Dead Lines
by notmanos
Summary: When the dead start flooding the world, Bob and Logan go after a death god who seems to be sleeping on the job. But what he wants - and what they can do about it - remains to be seen. WIP
1. Chapter 1

_Author's note: I'm still doing my other thing, so updates on this might be t hin on the ground, according to my schedule. But I figured maybe a little something was better than nothing._

_Disclaimer: The character of Wolverine the X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy. Bob and his crew are all mine. Please ask for rental rates on Bob and his crew_

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**Dead Lines**

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1

Angel wasn't sure at first what woke him up. It was just a bad feeling, or perhaps more correctly, a feeling that he was far from alone. He wished it was new.

It was just before sunrise, but he'd already been in bed, as it had been a far too long day/night already. Wolfram and Hart were back to their old tricks again, and god, it was tiring. He could believe this was hell, in the sense that sometimes he felt like Sisyphus, and this would be a stone he would forever roll uphill only to have it come back and flatten him again.

He got out of bed and headed to the living room, too weary to sneak. If there was something out there, he was kicking its ass and going back to bed.

He knew instantly he was dealing with something strange. Now normally, as a vampire, he couldn't feel cold – he couldn't feel hot either, even as his skin was burning and falling off (unless the sun set him on fire or holy water was thrown on him). You just didn't feel those kinds of things when you were undead. But he felt the slightest chill when he stepped into the room, and he knew it was supernatural. He saw the back of a rather Human looking man trying to look through his dark tinted windows that kept out the sun. He was wearing old jeans and a brown leather jacket, hand cupped over his eyes and his face pressed against the glass. "This is some fancy ass set up you got here, mate," he said, with a faint Irish accent lightening his voice. "You musta done pretty well for yourself, huh?"

Angel was reasonably certain he wasn't dreaming. "Doyle?"

Doyle turned around, and grimaced at seeing Angel in his boxer shorts. "Wow. You bring new meaning to the phrase "fishbelly white". And comin' from an Irishman, that's really sayin' somethin'. You know they got spray on tan now, yeah?"

Okay, if he wasn't dreaming, this was a trick. "You're dead."

"Well, so are you, if you wanna get technical." He reached into the pocket of his jacket, pulled out a crumpled cigarette pack, and then frowned at it. "How come I'm here?"

"Huh?"

"Why am I here? I mean, last thing I remember was gettin' dissolved by a big bloody light. Now here I am, in your fucking posh penthouse, trying to figure out what the hell's goin' on. Didja conjure me up or something?"

Now Angel was deeply confused, and the distant itch of the sun beyond the blacked out windows did him no good at all. "You didn't come here of your own accord?"

"No. Hey man, didja finally spend all that money I just knew you were sockin' away somewhere?"

"What?"

"The digs, man! Ain't no way you could get this place on a detective's salary."

"Logan gave it to me. He got it as a gift from someone in the Yakuza ... or was it the Triad? I dunno, some Asian gangsters."

"Whoa. Is this Three Legs Logan we're talking about here? 'Cause, trust me, you do not wanna get mixed up with him and his gangster problems."

Three Legs Logan? Now he knew it was really Doyle – he seemed to know the most unsavory people in the L.A. demon underground. "No ... you don't know this Logan. I think he inherited the place, but I'm not clear about it. Partly I think it was a payoff so he wouldn't come back and kill them."

"Wow. Hard case?"

"Made of concrete and adamantium."

Doyle's blue eyes flashed with a warning before he scowled at him. "You runnin' with a rougher crowd now?"

"Not rougher, just ... weirder. Are you a ghost?"

Doyle walked over to his coffee table and kicked it. His leg went right through it, harmlessly. "I'm gonna take that as a yes," Doyle admitted, and sounded vaguely disappointed. "Can I still smoke? I mean, I still got me cigs."

"I ... have no idea."

"Ain't you supposed to know this kind of stuff?" Doyle pulled a single cigarette out and looked at it warily before sticking it in his lips. He then began searching his coat for a lighter.

"Well, it depends on what kind of ghost you are. There's different kinds." Angel rubbed his head, trying to figure out why, after all this time, Doyle would return as a ghost, and return as a ghost in a place he'd never visited in life.

"Think the Powers are fucking with us?"

He shook his head and shrugged helplessly. "Maybe, but why would they? I think I'd better make a call."

"Not Ghostbusters, I hope."

"No. Not exactly." His first impulse was to call Giles, as he might have some idea what was going on, but Doyle's mention of the Powers That Be made him reconsider that.

There was someone else he should call first.

* * *

It was the first dozen reports of puzzled ghosts that set off his warning bells.

One actually was an old customer, and when he tried to reclaim his old stool at the end of the bar, he ended up falling through it as soon as he attempted to sit down. Another ghost came in, obviously distressed and seeking his help. They would be the first of many, of that he had no doubt.

Not to give the Powers too much credit, but this was too pointless and juvenile for them. Besides, some of these people would have no truck at all with the Powers, nor the Powers with them. So what was going on? This was the work of a full on asshole – which didn't narrow the list at all. But the fact that they were all dead was a clue.

He imagined an elevator bringing him down slowly, dropping down from absolute darkness to stratas of earth and stone, and metal and magma just for a kick. "I wanna see you all buried alive," Bob sang, as he imagined the doors sliding open on Osiris's realm, the endless library of the dead. "And I'll be up top carrying on over you, only for you." He walked out to see that nothing had changed, as it had never changed over the millenniums. There were marble floors that had veins of what looked suspiciously like god and demon blood running through them, and endless rows upon rows of bookshelves that contained tomes made of the flesh of a variety of species, most intelligent. Carnivorous vines clung to the top and gripped the sides, draped over the books as languidly as spent lovers, moving with the sinuous movements of snakes. As he walked down the aisles, they cringed away, some curling back over the top as if trying to escape. It was his energy; what he gave off was unpleasant to them, much like he found Osiris.

"I asked you nicely once, but I won't do that again," he sang, and knew Osiris must have known he was here by now. What game was that bastard playing now? "Sy, you Seth kissing mongoose tumor, don't you even try and hide from me!"

Bob had found his way to the book stand, where Osiris wrote the names of the dead, and while there was an open book of Human flesh there, the quill pen resting in a bottle of blood, the pages were blank. Had he scarpered at the idea of his visit? "C'mon, you weasel turd, come out and take it like a man. You started this, not me. What the fuck are you playing at?" Still nothing; he didn't even sense an angry energy surge. Sy was really prickly and thin skinned – it was easy to push his buttons. Fun too. Oh sure, he was a coward at heart, but he had too much pride to hide in his own realm. He was a death god, after all.

Bob reached out with his mind and sent out a pulse of mental energy, knowing that wherever Osiris was in this dimension, he'd nail him.

Which was why it made no sense when he hit nothing.

He opened his eyes and scratched his head. "Huh. He couldn't have gone on vacation, could he? Where do miserable bastards go? Miami Beach?"

He noticed movement out of the corner of his eye, and saw one of the vines sneaking down cautiously – if a semi-intelligent energy form in the form of plant life could be said to be cringing, that's what it was doing. It twined a tendril around the edge of a book and rocked it back and forth.

"Trying to tell me something, Lassie? Is Timmy down the well again?" He reached out to grab the book, being sure not to touch the vine (he would kill it; he wouldn't mean to, but it wouldn't survive contact with his kind of energy), and noticed that the book was loose.

The book shouldn't be loose. The books contained the names of all that had died and would die for several different realms and dimensions; that's why the shelves stretched on forever. There was no end to death, so there was no end to the shelves, to the books – they were stacked so tight, one against another, that you'd need a pry bar to get one down. Bob reached his hand in, and realized there was a gap in the shelf. "Fuck me cross-eyed, there's a book missing." The vine curled up the stacks, getting away from him, sure he'd gotten the message.

So there was a book of the dead missing, and Sy himself missing. Okay, this was very, very bad. Impossibly bad.

Bob suddenly had an idea of how the ghosts had returned, and while it was impossible to say why someone – and it would have to be a very powerful someone – would do such a thing, he knew how they were popping up.

Sy wouldn't do this. He liked death, liked his control over the dead, and he was super anal about the books. He actually had a filing system, which seemed insane when you had an infinite number of books that you never needed to consult for any reason.

Someone had just declared war. But Bob wasn't sure if it was on the living or the dead.

* * *

Logan was having a really nice dream.

He was in back of his cabin, chopping wood with a small ax, which struck him as a little silly. He could just pop his claws and make short work of these logs, but there was something strangely meditative in the repetitive movements of chopping, the way his muscles burned from exertion and his lungs were scoured raw by the sharp intake of frosty air. He felt almost Human, and if he didn't think at all, he could almost fool himself.

"Chopping wood in the Alberta highlands in a vest? You are just all kinds of homo-erotic, aren't you?" Bob said cheerfully, waving at him from the back porch.

Logan scowled at him, and then looked down to see what he was wearing. Boots, jeans, white tank top. "What d'ya mean vest? You using the British term?"

"Oi, it's Ozzie."

"It was British first. Deal with it, kangaroo boy."

"Oh, so we're gonna play it like that, huh?"

Suddenly the mindscape changed, and he was standing on the patio of Bob's Sydney place, looking over the broad expanse of the harbor, the water as blue and tranquil as a dream. His ax was gone. "Goddamn it," he snapped, glaring at Bob, who was sitting at the patio table, drinking a beer. He was now wearing very loud board shorts and a teal tank top that had a happy bar of soap on it, saying _'Rub me on your butt!' _He hadn't seen Bob for a while, and this was a sad reminder of what he hadn't missed. "You couldn't just ask politely?"

"Where's the fun in that?" he replied, giving him shit eating grin number three – or was it five? Fuck it; he was never any good at organizing.

Logan sat heavily in the lone empty chair, and asked, "Are you buggin' me for a reason, or just 'cause?"

"Can't it be both?" he asked, still grinning. But then he seemed to sober up instantly, his smile fading as he put the beer down on the table. "Sorry mate, but things are fucked up. Think I'm gonna need your help here."

"World ending again?" He reached across the table and snagged the beer can. If Bob objected, he made no mention of it.

"Not precisely ... although that could be an after-effect. Dead people are popping up all across Los Angeles."

He took a swig of the beer. He could barely taste it. "L.A.'s full of dead people."

"Yes, but these are people who are honestly supposed to be dead. Not undead, but dead dead. And it's going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better."

He wished he was surprised, but it was hard to be surprised when you knew Bob. "We talking zombies here?"

"Ghosts for the most part. But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we get zombies too. And vampires. Ooh, maybe even zombie vampires."

"What's going on?"

"Well, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure. What I do know is someone has stolen a book of the dead, and they're erasing the names. They may have also done something to Osiris, but honestly, that wanker can rot."

"Book of the dead?"

"Sy was very conservative; he loved the pomp and circumstance of tradition. So while he didn't technically hafta, he wrote down the names of the dead in his books. Someone stole one – someone powerful – and now they're taking out the names."

"And that makes them come back to life?"

"Not to life, no – but they're not dead anymore either. It's a kind of an existential grey zone."

Logan tried to make sense of that for a moment, but couldn't. He was giving himself a headache, so he gave up. "How many names in a book?"

Bob tapped his nose. "Ah, got to the heart of the problem. Anywhere from a few million to a billion or so."

Logan stared at him for a very long moment. He said it so casually, almost cheerfully, that he could have believed it was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. It was just so shitty that Bob opted to laugh rather than cry. "A billion dead people?"

"From all dimensions and places in the timeline. I'm rather hoping the ghost of Attila the Hun comes back and starts chasing people with a ghost sword, but that's just me."

"Do you know what's gonna happen? It's gonna be chaos, if not an all out massacre if they're zombie or vamps."

"I know. It's why I came to see you."

He shook his head. "To kill zombies?"

"To track down who has the book. It's gotta be someone powerful enough to take out a death god, which really leaves few suspects. I mean, everybody hates Sy – he's a berk in any dimension – but only a handful could've gotten him outta the way for any length of time."

"Oh god, more god shit?"

"Most likely death god shit. Usually only one death god can take out another death god."

"Isn't that like a paradox or something?"

"Yes and no. Like most things involving gods, it doesn't make too much sense, and kind of depends on what angle you're looking at it from. Mainly, it'll just make your head explode, so try not to dwell on it."

"But what's in it for them? I mean, if they're a death god, why let so many dead people out of their purview? I mean, isn't that what they do? They're putting themselves out of a job." Logan heard himself talking, and wondered if he should just pop his claws against his own forehead. That actually made sense to him, which indicated some form of severe brain damage.

Bob nodded. "Too right." Then he was silent.

Logan wanted to reach across the table and slug him, but he'd see him coming and he'd never be able to land the hit. "That's not a fucking answer!"

"Yeah it is. You hit it on the head. Somebody wants to quit."

"What?"

"Somebody's tired of being a death god. So they're just throwing 'em back. They want somethin' to put 'em all back, I dunno." He then grinned at him brilliantly, his teeth almost blinding. "That's what we're gonna find out."

Logan sagged in his chair and let his head fall to the table with a dramatic thud.

He hated god shit; he really did.


	2. Chapter 2

2

"Oh my god, it's a total Casper fest out there," Xander proclaimed, coming through the door of Angel Investigations. He was inside and taking off his jacket before he noticed Angel standing behind Bren's desk, with Doyle standing beside him. Since he was ever so slightly translucent at the edges, Xander knew instantly he was late to the party. "Oh, hey, dead guy. I'm not talking to you, Angel – I'm talking to that guy."

"I got that."

"His name's Doyle," Rogue piped up from the couch. She was holding a cup a coffee she almost never drank, making Angel wonder if she had absorbed a true caffeine addict at some point, but had only enough of the person still left to want to have it but not to drink it. Either that, or she didn't like her own coffee.

"Right. I'm Xander." He looked momentarily confused. "Haven't we worked with you before?"

"Huh?"

"The last thing he remembers is his death," Angel said, grimacing at the thought. Not a good night. Week, month, year.

"Oh. Shitty. I know how that is, if it's anything."

"You've died?" Doyle wondered.

"Kinda. Sorta. No, but ... kinda."

"Well, that answers that," Doyle said, looking away before rolling his eyes.

"Hey, I'm trying here." Xander got himself a cup of coffee, then asked, "So what's up with all the Sixth Sense extras?"

"According to Bob, it has something to do with a death god."

"A death god?" Rogue repeated. "How many are there?"

Angel wondered if he should tell her. Ultimately, he decided to. "Bob said there's three hundred and forty two, but I think he just made that number up."

"Bob?" Doyle asked, turning back to him. He was still fiddling with his cigarette. "You don't mean Maximum Bob, do ya?"

"Actually, yeah. You knew him?"

Doyle scoffed. "Knew him? Bloody hell man, all of West Hollywood pretty much belongs to him. He's a major player - and major trouble. Since when did you get mixed up with a guy like that?"

"It's a long story. But you're right, he's major trouble."

The door burst open again, and this time Bren and Kier came in, Kier as serenely beautiful as always, Bren a little more wide eyed with confusion. It was a warm day already, Los Angeles was in the grip of an early and hellish - no pun intended - summer, so Bren had opted to wear a sleeveless green muscle shirt that showed off the tattoos that marked him as a Chosen of the Gorgons: black vines tangled and draped his arms from hands to shoulders, a sleeve of black ink that, every now and again, out of the corner of your eye, seemed to ever so slightly move. People had complimented him a lot on his tattoos, seemingly never aware that that wasn't exactly what they were. "Holy shit, is hell full? There's ghost all over - and a ghost in the office. Sorry dude," Bren said, seeing Doyle.

Doyle noticed Bren's ruby red eyes, and asked, "Brachen?"

"Yeah, half."

"Awesome. I'm Doyle, the half breed that used to be here."

"Oh, hey! I've heard so much about you. Nice to meet you. I'm Brendan."

"Irish name too? Wicked." Doyle nodded his head towards Kier. "Got another vamp workin' for ya, Angel? I thought you were one of a kind."

"As it turned out, no."

"Actually, I'm Bren's boyfriend," Kier said. "I just help out from time to time. I'm not really an employee."

"A gay vampire? Actually, that makes all kind of sense. I always thought vampires were all a bit gay."

Angel looked askance at Doyle. "Pardon?"

"Oh, c'mon man. Do you only feed on women? Do you only turn women? Naw. And let's face it, the whole biting and sucking thing is kind of intimate."

Both Bren and Kier nodded. "It is, yeah," Kier agreed.

Xander started to laugh, but quickly hid his face behind his coffee mug. Angel shot him an evil glare, but that seemed to make his giggle fest worse.

As Bren took his usual seat behind his desk - and Kier took a post on the couch, out of the way of the window (shades pulled or not, he didn't seem to trust it, and who could blame him) - he asked, "Where's Giles?"

Angel was glad he'd given him an out. He'd have to give him a raise. "On his way. He picked a hell of a day to sleep in." Actually, Giles had a cold, proving that being a Watcher and all around wizard didn't necessarily save you from the cold virus. He had the previous couple of days off, so Angel hoped he was recovered by now, but he still sounded congested on the phone. It had been so long since he had any kind of Human illness he had completely forgotten what it was like, and how long they lasted. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

Bren was on his computer, calling up street web cams and confirming that the dead weren't just in L.A. but scattered all over, which honestly wasn't good at all. Local would be bad enough; global was nearly impossible. How the hell were they going to handle that? But then again, how did they handle a death god? That was all Bob's territory, not theirs.

Speaking of which, Angel - and from the way he looked at the door, Kier - heard faint singing, but it was a few more seconds before the others could make it out. "- you wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife ..."

Finally, the door swung open, and Bob made his entrance, followed by a grumpy looking Logan. A bit of a surprise, but in retrospect Angel realized he would bring Logan with him if he intended to take on a god. No matter that he was outclassed and overmatched; Logan never said die. He might actually die first. (And would probably still come back. You had to give him credit for superhuman tenacity.) "G'day L.A., how's the dead men walking? Hey, Doyle! How's it hanging?"

Doyle didn't answer. He was staring in wide eyed horror at Logan, and suddenly jumped behind Angel, as if using him for a Human shield. Actually, he moved through him, an always disconcerting feeling of a cold wind passing through his bones. "Holy fuck! You brought Wolverine? Are things that bad?"

General surprise seemed to sweep the room, but no one was more surprised than Logan. "You know me?"

"You know him?" Angel echoed.

"Fuck yeah! You don't? The mutant assassin? Everybody in the demon underground knows him. The Human equivalent of a neutron bomb."

"Shouldn't that be threshing machine?" Bob asked, with a sunny smile. For some reason - the weather, perhaps? - he was wearing loud blue floral patterned surfer shorts, and a pale blue tank top with the words _"I'm gonna eat you!"_ beneath an inexplicable cartoon of a roaring orange with teeth. He had mirrored sunglasses perched up in his blond highlighted brown hair, and had a day's worth of stubble dusting his cheeks, giving him the look of a surfer who got lost on his way to Malibu. Angel assumed he'd be wearing flip flops, but no, he was completely barefoot. Angel would have wondered how he didn't have broken glass and needles sticking through his feet, except this was Bob - he could have given himself titanium soles. He was an energy being after all; the body was mostly just for show.

Logan gave Bob a nasty sidelong glance. "I didn't know I was that well known."

"In some circles," Doyle admitted warily. After a moment, he asked, "So you're not here to kill us all, then?"

"No," he snapped irately.

"Hey, he's a good guy now," Rogue said.

Doyle looked mildly disbelieving at that pronouncement. "Like Angel?"

"Yep," Bob said, flopping down on the sofa. "We're all good guys here. Most of the time."

"It's very situational," Rogue said, getting into the spirit of things. Unlike the others, she was still almost all covered up, with only the V neck of her long sleeved t-shirt showing any skin. She still wore gloves and jeans, although in some nod to the weather the gloves were very thin silk.

"Where's Naomi?" Bob asked.

"Her Aunt in Ottawa is ill. She went up to take care of her, but she called the day before yesterday, and thinks she'll be back by next week." It had been unusually quiet, all things considered, so Naomi returning to Canada and Giles taking sick days didn't seem like a big deal. Now it seemed like a big deal. It figured the shit would hit the fan when you were least able to deal with it.

Bob grimaced. "Damn. Electrical discharges can disrupt ghosts. She could have kept them at bay."

"It's not like ghosts can attack ya," Doyle said.

"Poltergeists," Angel noted. "They can get violent."

Logan cleared his throat, and pointed at Bob. "He can make 'em disappear. Why are we even discussin' this?"

Doyle gave Bob a curious look. "You can make 'em disappear?"

"Sorta. Um, I'm a god."

"Bullshit!"

"No, really. I kinda got kicked out of the god fraternity, they tried to make me forget I was a god and put me in a Belial demon body, yada yada yada, long story short, god. Not a popular one, mind you, but I'm only the patron saint of liars, so I'm not required to do a lot of heavy lifting."

Doyle was still looking at him skeptically, and turned to Angel for confirmation. "He shitting me?"

"Sadly no."

"Well, fuck. No wonder no one would touch you."

"I have a rather pungent aftertaste," Bob agreed.

"We didn't need to know that," Xander said, mock shuddering.

"Hate to interrupt the playful banter, but do we have any idea what we're gonna do next?" Kier interjected.

"Thank you." Logan replied.

Bob stretched somewhat theatrically, and put his arms behind his head, as if relaxing. "Yeah, I'm thinkin' we need to go to the Below. If a death god is gonna hide out, away from other gods, they could hardly do better than Below."

"Below where?" Xander asked, obviously confused.

Angel felt a small cramp in his gut. He hadn't heard that name in ages, and it wasn't welcome now. "Do we absolutely have to?"

"Fuckin' 'ey, that's a bit hardcore, isn't it?" Doyle exclaimed. "How you gonna get there?"

"My bar is a nexus point," Bob said. "It exists simultaneously in several different dimensions at once."

"What's goin' on here?" Rogue asked.

"What's Below?" Logan asked. "Another dimension?"

"Yes and no," Bob told him, unhelpfully. "It's basically a shadow city, one that exists parallel to this one in every respect. Ever wonder why the world isn't actually overrun by demons? There really isn't enough Slayers and do gooders to hold back the tide. The truth is, given the choice, most of the demons prefer the Below: a world where demons are the majority and there are almost no Humans at all. Sometimes people accidentally end up there, but they don't last long."

"So it's a demon Earth?" Xander asked, looking astonished. "I think I've been there. They have a Sunnydale High School, right?"

"I'm not sure I can go," Angel told him.

Bob looked at him with his electric blue eyes, and Angel could feel the look piercing through his skull. "Oh dear. Now why would you go and do something like that?"

It was funny, but both Logan and Doyle looked between them with the same head gesture, although Logan looked more pissed off. "What?" Logan asked first.

Angel was going to say it, but Bob spared him from it. "Angelus killed the Emperor of the Below and took over for a few months. He killed ... what, a few thousand?"

He shrugged and shook his head, not actually sure, and Rogue, Kier, and Bren were just gawking at him in shock. Xander rolled his eyes, and asked, "Man. Is there anywhere where Angelus wasn't a complete dick?"

"Why'd you only stick around for a few months?" Logan asked, with a sort of casual gruffness. This news didn't surprise him, and it was possible he had something similar in his past. That was one thing they had in common: a long bloody trail of dead bodies behind them.

He didn't want to admit it. It wasn't something he had thought about in decades for a very good reason, but he didn't see a way out of it. "He got bored. And there weren't enough people to feed on."

Doyle seemed gobsmacked. "You – Angelus – ruled a dimension for a while? Seriously? And got bored with it?"

Wow, he thought he felt bad about it before everyone knew about it. He looked down at Bren's computer, pretending he saw something interesting there, ignoring the looks he was getting from everyone but Logan and Bob. "Put that way, it sounds horrible."

"Okay, so here's what we do," Bob said, sitting forward and changing the subject. He was giving him a pass, at least for now, and Angel wasn't sure if that was good or bad. "Logan, Bren, Kier, we're gonna go to below and see if we have a death god living incognito there. The rest of you guys will stay here and get geared up to fight the inevitable zombies."

"Zombies?" Xander complained. "I hate zombies. They should wear those little pine tree air fresheners like necklaces."

""Why would I stay here?" Rogue complained. "What can I do against zombies anyways? I'm comin' with you guys."

"Humans really shouldn't go there, love," Bob told her, not unkindly.

"Logan's goin'," she countered. "Besides, I'm with you. Who's gonna fuck with me?"

"Fair point," Logan said.

Bob sighed and then shrugged. "Fine. It's a bit of a sausage fest anyways. Might be good to have a woman around."

"I could go with ya," Doyle offered. "I might actually be able to touch stuff in Below."

Bob nodded, standing up. "You might." He looked at Angel, and said, "We'll be back soon. In fact, if I don't time this right, we'll be walking in the door at the same time we're walking out. You gotta love time differences in other dimensions."

Logan gave Rogue an almost paternalistic look, and asked, "You sure about this?"

She nodded. "I don't like zombie films anyways. I can't imagine the real things are any better."

"They're a bit worse," Logan admitted, surprising her. What, she didn't know Logan had fought zombies before?

Leading the way out, Bob started singing again, raising his voice to the rooftops. "I was waiting, oh I've been waiting, long enough to take this town. All the way down -"

As soon as Doyle, the last member of the procession, followed them out (through) the door, Xander asked, "What is with the singing?"

Angel was forced to shrug. "I dunno. I've never figured it out."

And since Bob was with them, he knew he had no reason to be concerned about them. In the Below, Bob would probably be even more powerful, if that was even possible. But mutant or not, Logan and Rogue were Human, and they were walking into a nightmare city, where Humans were a delicacy not unlike caviar.

And he had no idea how the city had recovered after Angelus's reign. He hoped it was better, because there was no way it could be any worse.

Was there?


	3. Chapter 3

3

It was funny how traveling only a short distance with Bob could feel infinitely long.

He didn't sing, which was good, but Logan found himself fielding questions from Rogue on why he hadn't let her know he was back in L.A. He had to explain he hadn't been, until Bob zapped him in less than an hour ago. He almost told her about the new team he had, but then didn't want her to feel bad or left out, so he kept his mouth shut.

They had to travel to the Way Station in the sewer, since it was kind of nice not to have Kier burst into flames, but it was also relatively ghost free (unlike the streets). Bren asked Bob – still barefoot and in surfer jams, even in the sewer – if he was serious about zombies, and he assured him he was, and he wasn't honestly kind of surprised the Galleria wasn't reenacting Dawn of the Dead by now. Everybody found that a comforting thought.

Doyle, although a ghost and beyond Logan's ability to harm him, still seemed to hang back and eye him warily, which annoyed the shit out of him. He felt like turning around and yelling at him, but what good would it do? Just convince him he was more of a psycho than he already thought he was. And it was a fair cop anyways – he was a psycho, just a different kind than the one he was before. He took a moment to make a call, aware that Doyle was still watching him as he made it, leaving a message for a friend. Angel and company might need a bit more help holding the city, and it would be nice to get them some back up. He also left a call for Storm, letting her know the mutants might be needed to hold New York City. But also maybe not – your average New Yorker was a pretty tough customer. Zombies shambling through the streets might not make them blink.

As everyone went up, Logan pulled Bob aside and asked him what their next move was, if indeed they found the AWOL death god. "We get the book back."

"And how do we do that?"

Bob gave him a big grin, a blinding flash of white teeth. "Depends on who has it, mate."

Which was a Bob way of saying "I have no fucking clue". Logan decided to set that aside for a moment, and went to the next point. "What happens when we get it back? Do we just write the people's names back in or what?"

He shook his head. "They should restore themselves after we have it back."

"How?"

"The book is being altered. Once names are written down, they stay. To remove them requires ... a lot of effort."

If you questioned Bob long enough, you could find the frightening subtext he always left out. "So we're dealing with someone powerful here. Stronger than you?"

"I have right on my side. No one's stronger than me."

Logan glared at him, for all the good it would do. (None.) "We've met gods stronger than you. We've fought them."

"And we're still here, so that tells you something, yeah?" And with that he headed up to the surface. Bastard.

They came up in the shadowy alley beside the bar, and once they were inside, past the glamour that made it look like an abandoned, condemned building to everyone else, they were suddenly hammered by the scent of demons and the sound of loud music.

They headed to the main room, which was half filled with various demons drinking, and half filled with ghosts, most of whom converged towards Bob as soon as they saw him. Bob raised his hands, and said, "Oi, I'm working on helping you all, but you gotta be patient. Right?"

To Logan's surprise, one of the ghosts was dressed like a Spanish conquistador, right down to the sword and strange little helmet, and he was plugging his ghost ears. "What is all this noise?" Logan realized belatedly he'd said it in Spanish. (Of course, what else was he going to say it in - pig Latin?)

"It's music," Bob told him. In English, but the conquistador understood him, because everyone understood Bob. (Unless he spoke that god language that made it feel like your brain was going to explode - only gods understood that.) "And if it's too loud, mate, you're too old. Which you are, so, sorry 'bout that." Bob then looked at Logan with a mischievous smile on his face. "Ah, the jukebox knows you're here."

It was playing the Murder City Devils now. Logan glowered at him. "Like I don't know you're controlling it."

Bob didn't answer that, just kept grinning, and motioned them to follow him as he headed to the back room, singing, "These idle hands, they do the devil's work, and these idle hands, they do a whole lot worse -"

Doyle looked back at the ghosts behind him, and asked Bren, "Bob knows conquistadors?"

"Assume Bob knows everyone," Bren admitted. "It makes it easier."

Ah, so the kid was learning. Excellent.

They retreated into Bob's office, which was the same as it had always been. Underlit, with crates packed against the side walls, bearing HazMat and radiation symbols, his desk a wooden relic near the back, with only an iBook to make it look like someone had been in here within the past century. There was a single wooden chair in front of the desk, looking like the perfect picture of loneliness. "So how do we get to this other place?" Rogue asked.

"Ow," Kier exclaimed suddenly, grabbing his head.

Bren was at his side instantly, holding his elbow. "Hon, what's wrong?"

"I don't know," he admitted, and his voice sounded a bit off, which prepared them for seeing that he was in vamp face now, all teeth and yellow eyes. "Why did I change? I wasn't expecting that."

"It's this place," Bob said, and it became apparent his skin was turning ever so slightly blue. Not cyanotic; it was like his blood was glowing, and his skin wasn't opaque enough to hide it.

"Whoa, hey," Bren said, looking at his own hand. It was turning ever so slightly green, like his Brachen side was just starting to surface.

"The energy's different," Bob continued. "Until you get accustomed to it, your demon sides will probably be more pronounced. It'll fade."

"It smells different too," Logan said. It did; it was a rich, loamy, musky smell, like a forest overpopulated with demonic animals - there was no Human smells, save for what was in this room.

"We switched already?" Rogue asked, looking slightly disappointed. "I didn't feel anything."

"You're human, sweetheart, you wouldn't." Bob told her.

"My Brachen side isn't coming out," Doyle said, placing his hand against the wall. It went right through it.

"No, you're a ghost; dead triumphs demon in that case. You should be able to move objects, though, if you think about it."

"Umm, Logan," Rogue said, and at his curious look, gestured to his hands. They were glowing faintly blue, mainly at the knuckles and the fingertips. He shot Bob a menacing look. "I thought all your energy was outta me."

"Most of it," he said, giving him a shit eating grin that reminded Logan that Bob was the King of the Liar Demons. Motherfucker.

Bob led the way out, back into the bar, and it was the same as the Way Station in Los Angeles proper, right down to the Murder City Devils song just playing itself out. The number of demons in the bar had changed, as had the kind, and there weren't as many ghosts - certainly no conquistadors. The bartender was also a seven foot tall demon with a three foot rack of horns on his head; he almost scraped the ceiling, and it was a good thing his neck was as thick as a suspension bridge cable, as Logan had no idea how he'd hold his head up otherwise. He nodded his head in Bob's direction as he entered, and most of the demons turned to look.

One, who looked very much like a snaky Ressik demon, got up, and hissed, "Humans." He reached for Rogue with a scaly, clawed hand.

Logan smacked it away, inserting himself between the Ressik and Rogue, and popped his claws as he sent a fist towards its face, stopping when the claws were about one centimeter from its huge eyeballs. The Ressik, as drunk as it obviously was, froze in sudden sobriety. "Sit down or I put you down." Logan said. He noticed, as an afterthought, that the blue energy limned his claws.

The Ressik's lipless maw open and closed several times, making him look like a mutated goldfish, before he found the will to back up and sit down. Logan was aware that the jukebox had switched over to Metallica's "Creeping Death", and he shot Bob an evil look. It only made Bob smile.

"Holy shit," Doyle exclaimed. "You do have knives in your hands! I always thought that was bullshit."

Rogue scowled at him for some reason. "I can take care of myself, y'know."

Doyle gave her a surprised look. "You got knives in your hands too?"

Logan ignored them, and asked the room, "Anyone wanna try somethin'?"

All the demons seemed really interested in their beers all of a sudden. The ghosts just seemed happy to be already dead.

"Good. Keep it that way." He retracted the claws back in his hand, and the Ressik jumped a little in his seat.

"That's what I love about you, Logan," Bob said cheerfully. "You love the dramatic entrance."

"So where do we go from here?" Kier asked, mainly because someone had to say something.

Bob whistled sharply and suddenly got up on a table, almost spilling the drinks of a Persaid and his Slime Demon pal. "I'm looking for a slumming death god. You probably don't know he's a death god, but he's full of a dark energy you can't help but notice - he probably told you he was a sorcerer or something. We need to find him before he brings the Powers crashing down on all our heads, so speak up. I can make sure he doesn't harm you."

This caused enough murmuring in the room to almost drowned out Metallica. Logan shared a glance with Rogue, Bren, and Kier, enough to confirm that they were all realizing the same thing: no one here knew that Bob was an fallen Power. What they thought he was they had no idea, but a god or being not nearly as powerful as he actually was. Perhaps they thought he was Kama.

"Um," a woman from a back table said. She was quite lovely, Indian, with toasted almond skin and silky black hair that fell softly to her shoulders, and she looked so Human Logan knew she was a vampire, even before checking to see if she was drinking a glass of blood. "I may know someone who fits that description."

Bob turned on a huge wattage smile, and Logan was surprised she didn't explode into dust. "Terrific. So where can we find 'em?"

"I, um, think he lives on the beach, you know, around Santa Monica? Guy has an aura like the black death. Real recluse. No one goes near, even if they could."

"Know how long he's been here?"

She shook her head and shrugged. "No idea. I know he creeps me out."

"Good enough. Creeped out vampires not a good thing." Bob jumped down onto the floor. "Okay people, let's saddle up."

"What the hell can we do against a death god?" Kier asked.

"Oh fuck," Bren suddenly exclaimed, flinging out his arm like he had a bug on it. "Fuck!"

"Kid, what's wrong?" Logan asked, but then he saw it: Bren's tattoos were moving. Not just corner of the eye shifting – they were slithering like snakes, cartoons given form and sliding over his flesh, spreading out over his collarbone, his neck, probably spreading down his torso.

"Bob, what the fuck's happening to me?!"

"Calm down," Bob told him soothingly. Was it a push? Logan couldn't tell, but he did seem to pause in mid freak out. "Demon powers aren't the only powers heightened here – god powers are heightened too."

"I'm not a god!"

"No, but you're the Gorgon's Chosen. On the Human plain, that means you can call on them for protection, and if you die, the Gorgons kill whoever killed you in the most horrible method possible. Here, they can protect you a bit more proactively. It's not just a mark, mate."

There was a small table full of demons he'd never seen before – red and leathery, with too many teeth and about three extraneous eyes – who did a double take at Bren as one muttered, "Gorgons?" They grabbed their beers and vacated to a table as far from them as Humanly possible. Yeah, they weren't the most touchy-feely, cosmic muffin type of goddesses. Actually, Logan's limited experience with them gave him the impression that they were especially belligerent gods that even other gods wanted nothing to do with – they were unfathomable and vacillated between distant and vicious. No wonder mythology gave them such a hard ride.

"So what the hell is it?" Bren asked, holding out his arms as if they were dripping with snakes, not just animated ink black vines.

"It's protection. Think of it as a kind of body armor."

"It's a tattoo."

"Since when do tattoos move?"

Bren stared at him numbly, and looked at his arms with the same shocked expression. He didn't know what to make of this development, but he didn't know what to do about this either. Either Bob pushed him and he didn't let the others hear it – more than possible – or he simply surrendered, because what the hell else was he going to do? He couldn't rip the marks off his skin.

"Wow," Doyle finally said. "What kinda weird ass cavalry are we?"

"We're being led by a guy in surfer shorts," Logan pointed out.

He half shrugged, conceding the point. "Got me there." At least Doyle didn't seem so put off by him anymore.

They headed out of the bar, and it was only then that Bob decided to fill them in on Below. "Couple things you need to know. It's always night here." It was pitch black outside, with light pollution from the city keeping the stars invisible. There were a few cars parked along the side of the street, and a few streetlights, but the buildings looked wrong – they were almost uniform rectangles, with most windows arch shaped and burning with pale amber light, like flame through honey. It was just slightly off enough to seem unforgivably wrong. Ironically, the sidewalks were much cleaner than they were back In the real Los Angeles.

"What, like in the Arctic?" Rogue asked.

"No. There's never any sun. It's just forever night. Also, ever since the death of the last Emperor, it's been a bit of a free for all. Territories are divvied up and decided in a Thunderdome style contest. So, who here has seen the movie The Warriors?"

Logan grabbed Bob's arm, and swung him around to face him. "Are you telling us that this place is more dangerous than the Bronx of the mid '70's? Or Moscow after dark now?"

Bob continued to give him a deliberately vacant smile, clearly hoping he wouldn't make a scene in front of the kids. Fat chance. "You're with me. How dangerous can it be?"

If there was an answer Logan liked less, he couldn't think of it right now. "You coulda filled us in, not -" he stopped short as a smell hit him, as physically as a punch. It was a hideous smell, like rotting fish poured into a landfill and blended together with corpses and mothballs. It made him back up a step and double over as he closed his eyes and tried very hard not to vomit. Kier exclaimed, "Holy fuck! What is that?"

"What is -" Rogue began, and then stopped as she must have gotten a lesser whiff of the stench. "Oh, god. What died?"

"You, in a minute," a voice said. It sounded gurgly, like someone speaking through a pan of water.

Logan felt the hair on the back of his neck, arms, and legs standing up before he was able to swallow back his rising gorge and straighten up. You knew it was bad when it felt like your skin wanted to leave your body and crawl away and hide somewhere.

But when Logan first looked, all he saw was a bunch of steroided vampires surrounding what looked like a huge pile of dead eels heaped up in the middle of the street. Then the pile moved, and seemed to grow larger as the horrible stench intensified.

Okay, it wasn't a pile of dead eels, but a demon ... thing. At its full height, it was maybe eighteen feet high, and it was all tentacles – long, blackish-green tentacles, varying in length from about ten feet to its eighteen foot height. It was all tentacles; Logan's eyes seemed to want to shy away from this huge collection of what appeared to be a million tentacles. Maybe there was some kind of a central pillar of a body holding all of them together, you'd think there had to be, as they looked like they roughly connected somewhere. But it wasn't really visible, nor was a face of any kind. It was just a million long, dead eels that smelled like Hell took a monster dump, and his mind wanted to reject the sight of this thing even more than his eyes did. It seemed like a violation of all the physical laws of nature, it wasn't right in any sense of the term, and that's probably why it dwelled in the Below, where it didn't matter so much.

"I thought I told you never to show your face here again, Bob," the thing gurgled. Well, it must have, the voice seemed to be coming from its general direction, but Logan still saw nothing approximating a mouth or a face.

Bob scoffed. "Like I'm afraid of the Lord of the Lard. Please Gurglgagog, get over yourself."

Gurglgagog? Logan's first guess was Jabba The Hutt – not even close.

"I am not Lord of the Lard!" It roared – well, gargled – angrily, a third of its lower tentacles thrashing and slithering in what seemed to be displeasure. "Stop with these grotesque accusations!"

"Or what, you'll slime me to death? Shift your bulk so we can move on, okay? We just have a bit of business to deal with, then we're outta here."

Shadows squirmed around them, and it seemed like a dozen demons materialized out of the darkness, some he recognized and some he didn't. They were surrounded, and both ends of the street were blocked. "I'll pick my teeth with your bones," the giant linguine monster said.

"It has teeth?" Rogue asked, surprised.

Yeah, Logan was thinking the same thing. He supposed, for better or worse, they were about to find out.


	4. Chapter 4

4

Logan knew, even before things got under way, that this battle was going to be terribly one sided. Or one tentacled, if that was even a phrase.

Logan had time to pop his claws and cut the first tentacle that lashed out at him, but the second caught him in the gut a millisecond later and sent him flying. He went crashing through a parked car, the windshield dissolving beneath him like the thinnest coat of rime on a pond, and he came to rest sprawled awkwardly on the collapsed front seat. Yeah – as an opening salvo, that could have gone better.

He wasn't the only one who ended up thrown down the street. Kier had gone flying, and Rogue just barely managed to dodge a hit by ducking down behind a parked car. Bob just winked out of existence, because as an energy being he had a choice in retaining his physicality or not (good thing – that tentacle almost decapitated him). Doyle was a ghost, therefore intangible, but he still stood back anyways. Leaving poor Bren in the middle of the street, bringing out his Brachen side so he was strong enough to take the beating.

But that was when they found out the battle wasn't totally hopeless.

A tentacle lashed out at Bren and he grabbed it, and there was this ear shredding noise, like a dental drill turned up to eleven and amplified, and the tentacle tore itself away from Bren, melting like it was made of wax. "What the fuck ..?" Kier exclaimed, picking himself up off the street. So far, the Eel Monster's vampire fan club was just watching. And why not? There was no reason to engage when they were getting their asses handed to them so easily.

Logan popped the door of the car he trashed and got out, replaying what he'd just seen in his head, waiting for all the glass shards to be pushed out of his back by his healing factor. "The vines, " he said. "Bren, the Gorgons won't let it harm you."

Bren looked at him, deeply confused. "What?"

"The vines are toxic to it." When Bren had grabbed the tentacle, it had looked like the tattoos surged, moving down his arms and spreading onto the tentacles, and it was those points of contact where the tentacle was melting.

Bren looked at his arms, which were now a sort of teal green with red spikes sticking out of them. With the black vines on top of it, he had clashing arms. The vines were still writhing, but like angry snakes – they wanted blood.

"Ooh, I can help," Rogue said, and darted out with an ungloved hand, touching the side of Bren's face.

"I don't think -" Logan began, but by then Rogue had borrowed Bren's power, turning teal green and getting red spikes shooting out of her skin. She broke the contact and made him stumbled back a couple of steps, but she didn't take so much that he collapsed, which was good. She looked at her arm, and frowned. "I don't have any vines."

"I was gonna say you get his abilities; the Gorgon vines aren't an ability," Logan said, flexing his back. Most of the glass was out, but damn, it was an unpleasant sensation.

Bob popped back into reality, this time slightly to the left and behind the eel tower, and holding a sword that looked to be made of fire, red-orange flames dancing in an impossible shape, balanced on a haft of marble. "Too right," he agreed, before stabbing the sword deep into the eel pile.

It screamed like a dentist drill once more and Bob was hit by a flail of tentacles, sending him flying or disappearing again (hard to say which under all those green-black scales), but the flaming sword was still stuck deep in the eel pile and wasn't shaking loose, which was counterintuitive, but wasn't a demon made of nothing but tentacles kind of counterintuitive too? None of it made too much sense, so he couldn't sweat the small stuff.

The tentacle flails headed towards Rogue and Bren, and Bren stepped in between it and Rogue, perhaps hoping to deflect it. The tentacles still hit him, sending both him and Rogue sprawling, but as its tentacles reeled back, they were melting where they'd hit Bren. He was pure poison to the thing, and they had to make that work for them, because that was pretty much all they had.

Kier started to lunge, probably to get protective of his boyfriend (for all the good that would do), but Logan grabbed his arm and joined him by Bren's side. He helped Rogue up while Kier helped Bren up. "We hafta work together," Logan told them, as Bob popped back in to ram another flaming sword – as improbable as the last – in the demon's opposite side. Again, he disappeared in a cascade of writhing demon flesh.

"Why isn't Bob just shutting it down?" Rogue asked, still frowning. In Brachen form, this looked ten times meaner.

"I'm assumin' it's immune to him, which is why he's goin' for the weapons." Also, Bob could have pushed him earlier and hadn't, suggesting that Sushi Skyscraper there couldn't be pushed. Hell, did it even have a brain he would recognize if he cut it out of its head? (Wherever its head was. No way to tell.) "Bren, you're are main weapon here, so you're gonna hafta try and get as close to it as you can. Grab a tentacle and don't let go; climb it like a rope."

"Say what?" Bren asked, horrified.

"Then, while its distracted with him, we do as much damage to it from as many different points as we can. But we're the real distraction – only Bren's vines have any hope of hurting this thing."

"I've never been good at climbing ropes," Bren continued. Logan ignored him.

"We hit as a group, and hope the Gorgons and Bob can shut this thing down enough to make it die or retreat, whichever comes first."

"And then what do we do about the vamps?" Kier wondered.

"Ropes and me? We don't get along," Bren continued, a bit more flustered. "Gravity hates me!"

Logan shrugged. "We gotta be alive to worry about them." As an afterthought he added, "No offense."

Kier shook his head. "'S okay. I was alive once."

"Guys, don't ignore me," Bren pleaded. "I can't do this."

Logan gave him a sympathetic look, but told him, "You hafta. You're all we got."

That made him look vaguely sick, but it was hard to tell, as he was already green.

Bren started down the street towards the thing, nervous but clearly trying to be brave, and they split up, moving slowly, hanging back behind Bren. Bren started off tentatively, and Logan could smell his fear, but then he must have figured fuck it, because he suddenly charged, fist pulled back as if about to punch it in its non-existent face. A tentacle lashed out, and Bren grabbed it as it slapped past, making Bren leave the ground, but he was still holding on to the tentacle, and it was melting in big snotty clumps as it screamed like a jackhammer being driven into the body of a steel car.

Logan ran then, slashing blindly, hitting tentacles without quite seeing them. He kept slashing deeper into the forest of tentacles, and the stench grew to hideous levels. The blood of this thing was basically liquid shit - black, thick, noisome - and pretty much explained the gagging stench of it. He would not only have to burn his clothes after this, but peel off at least one layer of skin.

Eventually a tentacle caught him and sent him flying again, only this time his fall was cushioned by a vampire minion not paying enough attention to get out of the way. As Logan got up off of him, he raked a claw behind him, cutting off his head and turning him to dust. The vampires around him didn't like that - they all looked in his direction, fangs and yellow eyes flashing, growling like a disturbed tiger. Logan, on his feet now, showed them his claws, still dripping with liquid shit gore. "Really? You think you guys could last one minute?"

"They'll -"

"- try -"

" - we all -"

"- do," said some very familiar voices. The crowd parted - well, partially parted. Some, when they realized who was coming their way, ran and hid in shadowed doorways. They'd try him, but this kind of trouble? No way.

The Weird Sisters. In shiny red plastic raincoats, baggy green cargo pants, steel toed boots, and blue t-shirts with kittens on them, they were adorably tacky serial killers, their hair swept behind them in new shorter (but still matching) cuts. The way the vampire horde cowered away from them, their reputation was as fearsome here as it was in the regular world. "Is this where you go when you disappear?"

"It's -"

"- fun -"

"- here, we -"

"- run the -"

"- entire coast and -"

" - San Francisco. Nobody -"

"- will try us. We -"

"- wonder why." They gave him brilliant stereo smiles that had no warmth at all, and crawled with madness.

Logan tried to shake it off - holy fucking god, these crazy bitches were creepy, even counting out the fact that their signature move was ripping people's arms off - and asked, "What about the spaghetti monster?"

"Yes -"

"- Bob -"

"- asked us -"

"- to help."

Speak of the devil - which he was pretty sure Bob had been called at some point (in fact, if you were a Biblical literalist, you could probably call him Lucifer) - Bob winked back into existence, this time right next to Bren, whom he grabbed by the shoulder. They both blinked out then, leaving Kier trying to physically rip a tentacle off (he was doing a pretty good job) and Rogue punching into the mass of its body, trying to make a more painful and meaningful hit. Before they could react to Bren's loss and their ultimate doom, Bob and Bren appeared right on top of the pile of eels. "Here, it's a better view," Bob told him, then drove Bastet's knife into the topmost tentacle.

As Bren pressed down on top of its head (? Maybe - hard to say), it screamed so loud windows blew out explosively all along the street, powered glass like frost peppering the sidewalk, and Logan grunted as his eardrums popped like cheap firecrackers. It left him feeling hollow and weird, hearing everything like the world was suddenly under water, but he could still hear the Sisters loud and clear as they said, "Dibs -"

" - on -"

"- the crowd."

The vampire minions around them - at least two dozen, probably more - visibly recoiled as they turned their insane smiles on them. Perhaps their reputation was even more fearsome here (and if they owned the California coastline, that would track), as despite their number advantage, no one wanted to fight them. Logan left them to it, glad the vampire crowd was pulling back (way back - you could see some running), and raced back towards the tentacle pile, slashing at everything that flailed his way. He'd must have cut off at least two dozen tentacles, but there was no obvious thinning of them, no lessening the pile at all. Did this thing grow them back?

It seemed to be shrinking, though, as Bren hung on to the top of it. Tentacles spasmed upwards, trying to knock him off, but couldn't quite manage it. Rogue and Kier were still trying to fight their way inward to the unknown eye of the tentacle hurricane, and Logan was hacking his way through, as Bob winked back into the middle of the street holding a bow and arrow. "This medieval shit is pretty awesome, inn't?" He pulled back the bow and shot an arrow, which burst into flame in mid-air before burying itself deep in the pile. Once there, there was a small but muffled explosion, and the pile quivered for several seconds like a Jello salad.

Logan was up to his elbows in liquid shit blood and wondered if he would smell this in his nightmares for years to come when the pile of tentacles suddenly collapsed like a badly made soufflé, and Bren yelped as he tumbled off the top. Kier was just underneath that section, though, and managed to catch him before he did a header onto the concrete. "Did you shoot an arrow made of dynamite into it?" Bren asked Bob, back on his feet but still looking shaky (and dripping with goop).

Bob, who no longer had the bow, smiled and shrugged. "It was either that or shoot a Denny's Grand Slam at it, and frankly I don't wanna know if he could get gas that bad."

Rogue made a noise of disgust and tried to fling the shitty blood off her arms. She was mainly unsuccessful. "What the hell was this thing made of? A septic tank?"

"He's mainly just one big digestive system. A stomach with tentacles." Bob said. He was irritatingly free of goop.

"Why are we even here again?" Bren asked, hands on his knees, trying to breathe through his mouth. "What are we doing?"

"We're after a death god. And I think we have an escort."

"You -"

"- do," the Sisters agreed. The vampire horde was gone; they couldn't have left fast enough. Bob had picked exactly the right back up. What they lacked in numbers they made up for in complete fucked up weirdness that no one wanted a piece of.

A tentacle flopped, making Bren jump. "It's still alive?"

"They're really hard to kill," Bob admitted. "It's just stunned. We probably oughta mosey along before he wakes up."

"Can we get a shower first?" Kier asked, trying to scoop the shit blood off his pantleg. He wasn't successful. This stuff clung like landfill mud.

"Shower?" Rogue replied in disbelief. "We're gonna need a fucking cyclone to get this crap off."

Bob continued grinning like this was all great fun. Of course, he was totally spotless, not a single splatter of shit blood on him, not a hair out of place. Bastard. "Well, it's a good thing we're goin' by the ocean, 'ey?" He started walking down the street again, bare feet slapping on the asphalt, when he paused and turned around. "Oh, but don't wake Cthulu, okay? Talk about a tentacled nightmare. He's even worse than this guy."

"We -"

"- like - "

"- Cthulu, he - "

"- owes us -"

"- twenty bucks."

Rogue flashed Logan an alarmed and quizzical look, and he could only shrug. Could have been a joke, could have been serious – he didn't know and he didn't care. As long as he got the shit blood off him before he had to fight it, he was good.


	5. Chapter 5

5

Was darkness darker here? It seemed like a silly and redundant thought, and yet, it seemed that way. Maybe it was due to the fact that there were fewer lights here, and certainly fewer cars – there were almost no cars. Logan saw them parked, but he didn't see a single one on the road. "Demons don't like cars?" he asked his fellow Canuck (Kier).

Kier shrugged, and shook out his coat. Nope, the shit blood just wasn't shifting. "Some demons love cars. I mean, physically – it's pretty disgusting. But here, they seem like they're only for show."

"It's hard to drive without running into obstacles," Bob said, having overheard their conversation. Never mind he was so far ahead of them there was no way he should have been able to hear. (Bob and the Sisters were taking point; he and Kier were bringing up the rear, in case someone tried to sneak up and jump them. So far, no one had been that stupid.) "There are perambulating demons all over, and mystical roadblocks to keep people from straying into another territory without paying a toll. And then there's the fact that some demons can't fit into the cars, others can't drive them, and others can't be near metal without dying."

"So why have them here at all?"

"'Cause they're cool."

Great. Demons could be as shallow and nonsensical as Humans. Well hell, gods could be, so why did he expect better behavior from them? Maybe he was just hoping that something would be a bit classier, even if they were demons.

Eventually they came to a house on the shore that could have been a studio set for a horror film. It was on stilts for absolutely no reason (it wasn't that close to the shore), and had an aggressively boxy shape that came to a sharp point, again for no reason. It cast a silhouette like an obese box cutter. Bob looked back at them and made a gesture with his hand, and Logan suddenly felt cleaner, and certainly smelled better. He looked down, and the muck was gone from all of them. "You could have done that earlier," Logan snapped.

Bob just gave him a shit eating grin. "What, and not give you something to bitch about? Consider it a gift."

"If-"

"-Bob-"

"-can't fuck-"

"-with you-"

"-he's not happy."

"So I've noticed," Logan replied, scowling.

Bob led the way up a narrow, freestanding staircase to the door, but rather than knock, he walked straight in. Was it unlocked, or did Bob make it so? Didn't matter. But as he crossed the threshold, Doyle shuddered, and said, "Bloody hell, that felt wrong."

Logan knew what he meant the instant he crossed the threshold. A cold shudder and a wave of nausea briefly flashed through him, as sudden as a reflex. "Holy shit."

"Why did I just get a hangover?" Rogue wondered, arms wrapped protectively around her stomach. She was still Brachen green and spiky, which may have been the only reason she hadn't lost her lunch.

"It's a security spell. Keeps beings out until they're let in."

"So how'd we get in?" Doyle wondered.

"What, like a simple ward spell's gonna hold me back?" Bob replied, as inappropriately cheerful as always.

Kier looked back at the doorway. "I didn't feel anything."

"You're dead. You're not a threat to a death god."

Kier raised an eyebrow at that. But before he could ask why he was here then, Bren interjected, "I didn't feel anything. I'm not dead."

"No, but you're protected by the Gorgons. That'll counter any spell remotely harmful."

"That doesn't work in our dimension, does it?"

"Only if it's a lethal spell."

"What a motley crew you have, Bob. You take this patron saint of losers thing seriously, don't you?" A voice asked, silky smooth and poisonous, neither male nor female but a bit of both. Logan didn't detect a scent over the home's overwhelming moss smell – chlorophyll and earth, something like leaf mold and earthworms – so he tried to follow the sound by hearing, but that was of no help either. But considering he was unable to move, he didn't know why he was bothering to track it. Instinct, habit.

He wasn't the only one. He could still move his eyes, and he saw that Rogue was rigid and her eyes were slightly panicked, while the Sisters and Kier took seats on a low, Victorian style sofa that hadn't been immediately visible in the overwhelming gloom of the room. Kier, indignant, snapped, "What the fuck ..? Give me my body back!"

"Don't -"

"- fight -"

"-it, it -"

"- doesn't help."

Bren tried to walk over to him, but stopped as he impacted with something invisible that flared brightly when he made contact with it. He staggered back and tried to see what he'd hit, but it had died down again. Still, when he waved his hand near it, it flared up again with a ghostly blue light. "A forcefield?"

"Won't hurt you, so the Gorgons won't care," Bob explained. "Very cute. Always with the weaseling, Azrael."

Doyle, who had loitered near the entrance since they came in, asked, "'Cause I'm dead, I'm screwed, ain't I?"

"Pretty much mate. Sorry."

"Azrael?" Kier exclaimed. "Isn't that another name for Satan?"

"No," that voice said again, with a disappointed sigh. Finally shadows coalesced and cleared in the abnormally dark room, and a figured emerged. It was an androgynous figure, neither male or female, tall and as abnormally pale as alabaster, with an overabundance of angular features making it look like a knife blade given humanoid form. Its hair was black, its eyes were black, its clothes were black – all living shadows that swirled around it like smoke. The temperature in the room automatically dropped about twenty degrees, and something unknown put Logan's teeth on edge. It was a full body feeling of chewing on tin foil. "Satan doesn't exist; it's a Human concept. I'm simply a death god, although I hear the meat bags often refer to me as an angel of death. How quaint. So Lucifer, what do they call you now?" It looked at Bob when it asked this.

Bob grinned in a cockeyed sort of way. "Tryin' to freak them out? Hon, they're with me. They're beyond bein' freaked out by names."

"So you're the Devil?" Bren asked. Actually, he didn't seem surprised.

Bob shook his head. "Devil is a Human concept – it's just another name for Satan. I'm just a fallen Power. Azzie is always good at freaking people out."

"You flatter me. I've never been as good as you," Azrael replied. Those endlessly dark eyes – all black, no white, no pupil, as big as kiwi fruits – settled on Logan, and he felt a chill run down his spine. It was like being way too close to dry ice. "That one smells of death. He's died before."

"I got better." Logan grumbled.

Azrael smiled. It was truly unsettling; it was like watching a piranha smile. "Did you now? This one wants to kill me. Can't kill a death god, Human."

"I know. But it'd shut you up for five seconds."

Azrael laughed. It was like bones scraping concrete. "Fabulous! Bob, you've got yourself a Horseman. You always did think ahead."

Horseman? What was that suppose to mean?

"Why are you slumming here, Az?" Bob asked, ignoring the comment. "In debt to the Russian mob?"

"Your sense of humor was always tiring. It's peaceful here, quiet, no meatbags to deal with."

"What happened to Osiris? What did you do to him and the book?"

Azrael snorted, and the smoke swirled like it was shifting position. "Like I would have anything to do with that idiot. I certainly wouldn't bother with a book." It gave Bob a sidelong glare, and Logan realized there was a very vague and yet very real resemblance to a raven. A white raven. "You really don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

"The rumors are Camaxtli's returned. Osiris is probably in hiding. He sold him out, didn't he?"

Logan felt his stomach sink like a stone. Jean. Not again.

"You're being bullshitted. Camaxtli's gone for good. He was wiped out by a more powerful god. You don't come back from that."

"Not usually. But supposedly some of his energy survived."

Bob shook his head vehemently. "Not possible. Someone wants you – us – to think that, but that's a lie. Believe me, I know lies when I hear them."

"Oh yes, lies and losers, your forte. In a multiverse where even a demon who wasn't supposed to know of his divinity finds it again, how can you doubt anything?'

"Who has the book, Az?"

"Like I answer to you. I am a death god. I answer to -"

"Answer the question!" Bob roared, in his god voice. It sounded like all of eternity shouting; it made Logan cringe, made his brain cringe, made his brain want to ooze out his ears and hide in the floorboards. At the same time, perhaps as a result of the shouting, perhaps to show off, he flared electric cobalt blue, and for a single second it looked like he had wings of blue flame sprouting from his back. From the way Azrael reacted, he/she had seen them too.

"You do not get pissy with me, angel of light," Azrael snapped, mouth curving downward in a sharp arc. "You do not have that right!"

"I have every right. Who are you protecting?"

Logan noticed Rogue staring at him. She mouthed the word, "Angel?" He wanted to shrug, but wasn't able to. Hopefully she saw that.

"I protect no one. I only kill."

"Then why hide here? Who's sent you into hiding? And don't give me that peace and quiet bullshit. Even gods can't lie to me. As you said, my forte."

"Can't-"

"-bullshit-"

"-a bullshitter," the Sisters offered helpfully, from their captive position on the couch. Being unable to move hadn't perturbed them in the least, unlike Kier, who still looked pretty pissed off about it.

Azrael attempted to glare the Sisters into full submission, but they just met it with empty eyes and empty smiles, and eventually Azrael gave up and glanced at Bob again. You knew you were batshit crazy when you could stare down a death god. "You've been led down the garden path, Bob. You should really ask your old pal Yama what he's up to. I'm sure he'd be thrilled to see you again. Perhaps invite you in for tea."

Bob's face just fell. He'd gone from looking scary angry to shocked and doleful in a single second. "Yama? This is Yama? Why? What does that old crank think he's doing?"

"I wouldn't know. Not my pantheon. Now, would you get the fuck out of my house?" Smoke started swarming around Azrael again, making him/her disappear as if sinking under murky water, but just before its face disappeared, those eerie abyss eyes focused on Logan again, sending that chill throughout his body, and it said, "Be seeing you again, Horseman." Now what the fuck was that supposed to mean?

They knew it was gone when they were suddenly released to move again. Logan let out a sigh, and asked, "Can I kill that thing? Please?"

Bob was staring down at the floor, lost in thought. From the look on his face, not happy thoughts. "Another time, mate. We have other problems to solve."

"Are you a god or an angel?" Rogue asked. "I'm really confused."

"Angel-"

"-just-"

"-means messenger -"

"-Humans always -"

"-forget that."

"They think I'm nothing but a messenger for the Powers. They like to twit me." Bob said, still distracted.

"Lucifer means light, doesn't it?"Bren said, talking more to himself than anyone else. "And he was a fallen angel. Are things finally making sense here?"

"If so, it'll be the first thing all day," Doyle noted.

"Who's Yama?" Logan asked, trying to prod Bob along.

"Another death god," he replied. "A pretty powerful one. Bad news all the way down the line. His realm will be hard to get into. It's not really open to visitors. Especially me."

"So is Jean alive again or not?" Rogue asked.

Bob shook his head. "Not yet."

Logan felt rooted to the floor once more, but this time it wasn't Azrael's doing. "Not yet? What do you – oh shit. The book."

"The book," he agreed. "If her name's in it and it's taken off, we'll have her to deal with again. Best case scenario, she comes back untainted by Cammy's energy. Worst case scenario, she's full of it. Bringing back avatars is unprecedented. I have no idea where this could end up. Either way, I can't see this being good for us."

No. Jean alone would probably be pissed at them. Jean as Camaxtli would be homicidal, and able to back it up. It would be ugly in either case. Not to mention the fact that he wasn't sure he could handle seeing her again. He had enough ghosts to deal with. Logan forced himself to stop thinking about it, and focus on the issue at hand. "Why does Yama hate you?"

Bob smirked at him almost painfully, as if he had arrived at the crux of their biggest problem. "Well, I kind of helped kill him and had him exiled from his pantheon."

Everyone stared at Bob in hollow eyed horror, probably hoping this was more of his sick sense of humor, but Logan knew it wasn't.

"Is that all?" Logan replied darkly. Oh shit. How were they going to deal with all of this?

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, they always did. Amazing how that worked.


	6. Chapter 6

6

Angel had been hoping Bob would pull a rabbit out of his hat – or knowing him, a wallaby out of his pith helmet – and shut this down before it got worse. But it had been barely an hour, and things had gotten worse by the minute.

"Shit, dead men walking," Xander reported, peering out between the slats of the blinds.

Giles sniffed, and looked up from the end of the couch. He was drinking strong tea, and looked slightly glassy eyed from the cold medicine he'd taken earlier. "How many?"

"Umm ... I'd say about two dozen, give or take some corpses. I can't tell if they're 28 Days Later super fast zombies, or Night of the Living Dead shambling zomboids. I can tell you polyester clothes are the only ones that don't rot. And not enough people were buried in Sansabelt slacks."

"I didn't ask for a fashion report," Giles replied.

"Hey, no one wants to see rotting dead Uncle bits, okay? If I hafta look at 'em, you're getting a report." He stepped back from the blinds with a sigh. "Well, we're fucked. Even if they're the shambling Romero types, there's too many of them for us to fight."

"I could take out a dozen by myself," Angel noted.

Xander pointed at the blinds. "Go out there now and you'll get a little flamey. While that'll probably take out at least one zombie, it isn't much help."

The door opened, and Helga came in. "That's why I'm here." She was wearing the tank of her flamethrower on her back, and a large sword in a scabbard across her chest, almost hiding her blue tank top and loose black linen pants, which had a hole cut in them to accommodate her tail. "I'll take one end of the street, you guys take the other end, we'll meet in the middle."

Xander stared at her. "Goddamn. How is it you can terrify me and turn me on at the same time?"

She quirked a single green eyebrow at him. "You're not a sex god or a Stansin, and you don't have Logan's stamina. So, no offense Human, but my appetites would kill you."

"What a way to go," Xander replied, not the least bit off put.

She shrugged a single shoulder. "Yeah, well, that's a point. So, we doing some zombies or what? Angel, get in the sewer, we'll try and send some down to you. Zombies are the dumbest of the undead, so if we just leave open a manhole cover or two, they'll fall right in."

Giles took a sip of his tea before putting his cup down and levering himself off the couch. "You've fought zombies before." Not a question, although just barely.

"I've pretty much fought everything before. Used to work for the demon mob, remember? Every now and again we'd get some stupid shit sorcerer who thought of the "brilliant" idea of sending a zombie army after his enemies." She snorted derisively. "Yeah, like no one ever thought of that gem before. What could go wrong with that genius plan? It's practically foolproof. Aside from the fact that rotting corpses are generally as dumb as a box of rocks."

"You were in a demon mob?" Xander asked. Had he forgotten, or was he never told? Angel honestly couldn't remember. But, to be fair, Helga's past didn't come up that much.

"Yeah. Helga the Headhunter. I was an assassin."

"You're trying to turn me on, aren't you?"

"Down boy," Angel said, too worried to be overly concerned about Xander's obnoxiousness. "Think we have a chance at corralling this?"

Helga nodded. "No zombie is ever getting the better of me." There was some comfort to be had in her certainty. For his part, Angel didn't like this, mainly because he'd be stuck down below where few zombies would go, and Xander, Giles, and Helga would be stuck with the true deluge. But at least he didn't have to worry about Helga, who could probably kill a dozen in her sleep.

Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't going to be as easy as it seemed.

* * *

Hollywood was so full of liars.

Xander always thought a zombie massacre would be fun. All those corpses shambling around, slow motion easy targets whose heads conveniently exploded just when you needed them to. It was like fighting lame demons, but with one third the danger, because you could run away if things got too heavy.

Of course the reality was different. The first zombies he encountered were a lot stronger and meaner than he anticipated, and there was no exploding heads, although to be fair no one had a shotgun, which greatly aided the whole exploding head thing. Now he wanted a shotgun, but Angel wouldn't give one to him. Look, he knew not to shoot around civilians, he wasn't seventeen anymore, he could handle it. But oh no, Dead Boy has to go on a power trip.

Once down on the street, it was kind of weird. It was eerily quiet, and yet there were so many people around. And there was a faint smell of death, which changed in intensity depending on the strength and direction of the wind. It was almost worse than Axe body spray, which some of the young guys on his construction crew would wear until he told them they were fired if they wore it again. He had no idea what toxic demon waste they put in that Axe shit, but he was glad he wasn't in high school anymore, as it was mainly teenage boys who seemed convinced you wanted to smell that bad at all given times. Really, the zombies smelled better.

Helga had the north end of the street all to herself, which seemed like an irresponsible thing, but she fired up her flamethrower and set off a huge swath of zombies like walking road flares. She must have had it set on extra crispy, as they seemed to light up and burn to nothing very quickly. She was waving the sword around in her tail, using it like a third arm – which, in all honesty, it was. Not new to mass killings, was she? No wonder she and Logan hooked up; they probably talked shop, whatever that was for assassins. What's the best blade to disembowel people with, and what detergent to use to get blood out of clothes probably. (Actually, if they knew the answer to that detergent question, he would like it.)

Even though chopping the heads off the first few zombies was quite easy – he had the battle ax with his name on it – the way the streets were continuing to crowd was really troubling. Giles was holding his own across the street, but Xander knew him too well. He was so zonked on cold medicine he was lucky to be on his feet, and the spells he was throwing were weak, mainly because he just didn't have the health to throw anything harder. Although Xander felt some inborn male need to look out for the female (silly when he was with Buffy and Willow, both girls could kick his ass, and yet he still did it then anyways because he was a big dumb guy), he instantly stopped doing it for Helga, as the smell of roasted dead was quickly covering up the smell of plain old dead, and simply the roar of the flames told him she had her situation and end of the street under control. He made a mental note to never worry about assassins, even if they were hot green chicks. What he was trying to do was look after himself and Giles, and while the zombies were thankfully the slow moving Romero type, their sheer density was becoming an issue. Apparently what they lacked in speed they made up for in numbers.

The problem really started when Giles broke into a coughing fit. It ruined his concentration on the spell he was casting, which had needed words to be said aloud. One of the shamblers grabbed Giles's arm, making him drop his sword, and Xander really didn't think you could become a zombie by being bitten by one, but if he was killed by one, then yeah, zombie town. Xander knew he'd never be able to get across the street in time, so he took aim and threw the ax. He sort of assumed it'd just stick in its head, like it did in all zombie films, but the ax cleaved right through it, splitting its skull and splattering an ooze of rotting brains before the ax hit the wall of the bank Giles was standing in front of.

Xander pumped his fist in triumph at such a good shot, but he only felt a few seconds of glee at his macho victory, as he suddenly remembered he'd left himself weaponless. "Good thinking, Harris," he muttered to himself, turning to see how much room he had. Not much, as the zombies seemed to realize he was weaponless and closed in. He kicked one away to give himself room, and was just contemplating whether or not he could physically rip one of their heads off (some of them were quite brittle; some of them had bits falling off them as they lurched down the street) when one had his head explode right in front of him.

"How d'ya like my boom stick, baby?" Marcus crowed, running up on top of a parked car, shooting two guns at the same time. Every bullet seemed to find its mark, which was dead center of a zombie head.

Finally, the hairy scary lumberjack had come through for them. He knew Logan had called someone before he left with Bob, but he had no idea who he called. Now he knew, and it made perfect sense. If you have friends who are killing machines, a zombie slaughter would be right up their alley.

There seemed to be a line of zombies falling in a path coming towards Xander, and he heard the sounds of flesh ripping even over the explosive noises of Marc's handguns, which never seemed to stop firing. He saw flashes of silver as well as zombie heads flying, and he thought for a moment maybe Logan had come back, but then the path was totally cleared, and he saw who it was – the mutant Arab pretty boy. Crap he was totally blanking on his name. But he had the whole cool action hero look going on, with black jeans and a brown leather vest, with a bandoleer full of knives crisscrossing his chest and leaving his muscular arms bare. He had two swords, but was only using one. "Where's your weapon?" he asked, then shoved his arm in front of his face. Xander was about to ask why, but then the zombie lunging for Xander bit it, and all its teeth snapped on his arm, falling from its mouth like spit out Tic-Tacs.

Right, unbreakable skin guy – Saddiq, Saracen.

He punched the toothless zombie down, and as he did so, swung his sword behind him without looking back, slicing what looked like a dead priest completely in half across the torso. "Holy fuck that was cool!" Xander exclaimed. "I am so gay for you right now."

Saddiq looked at him blankly. "I'm asexual."

"It's just an expression, man." Oh, right – Saddiq also had nothing in the way of a sense of humor. Xander looked towards Marcus and whistled sharply to get his attention. As soon as he had it, he shouted, "Got a gun for me?"

Marc canted his head to the side in a skeptical manner, still occasionally firing and exploding a zombie head. (Was that perfect aim thing a mutant ability? It must have been. Maybe it went with his infrared vision.) "Can you actually use one?"

"Yeah. I was in the Army. Kinda. I was possessed by an Army guy once." Because Marcus was wearing the same black welding style goggles he always wore, he couldn't really read his expression, but Xander just guessed the skepticism. "It's hard to explain, but I can dismantle and reassemble an M-16 in my sleep. Does that help?"

"Why didn't you say so?" Marcus popped an empty clip on one of his guns, tucked the gun in the waistband of his leather pants, and reached behind him. Suddenly a gun was flying through the air towards Xander, and he had to catch it with both hands. "I left my M-16's back at the hotel, so that'll hafta do."

"Awesome." He didn't know what kind of handgun it was, but it was a lot heavier than he expected. Still, he knew where the safety was and thumbed it off as he looked at Saddiq and said, "Protect Giles."

He looked around, spotting him across the street, and nodded faintly before slicing his way across the street. It was like watching someone harvest wheat; he just cut zombies down like they were nothing, and the zombies just stood and took it. Zombies weren't known for their self-defense skills.

He fired the gun and nearly fell on his ass. He supposed he should have expected such a big kickback since it was so heavy, but he didn't. He had to hold it with both hands to fire it, which didn't look as cool as Marc shooting one handed, but he didn't have mutant steel cable arms either. Show off. Still, there was deep satisfaction in watching the zombie's brains explode.

A fire hydrant at the far end of the street exploded open, but after the water fountained up, it suddenly shot off on a course parallel to the street, with enough force to decapitate several well rotted zombies. So the water mutant guy hadn't sat this one out. Xander figured, of all people, he probably should have, but he wasn't doing too badly with the water decapitations. He also conveniently put out fires caused by flaming zombies.

In almost no time the street was covered in a carpet of dead zombies, some smoldering, some chopped in half, but all the permanent kind of dead. His ears were still ringing and numb from the gunshots – they were as loud as M80's – and his arms felt bruised from absorbing the kickbacks, but he still felt good about what they'd accomplished: full sale zombie slaughter. They should get commemorative t-shirts to mark the occasion.

And that's when he heard the screams.

They weren't Human screams, although almost. They were high pitched and sharp, and made the hair stand up all over his body, and that was weirdly uncomfortable. The screams seemed to echo, or be taken up by other similar things, but it seemed to be coming from both ends of the street.

"What the fuck's that?" Marc asked, jumping off the car and onto the street, ejecting another empty clip and slamming a full one home, all pretty much at the same time. "Some zombie's mom?"

"Oh shit," Helga exclaimed. "It's ghouls."

"Ghouls?" Giles repeated, sounding alarmed. That was never good. "Are you sure?"

"Ghouls?" Xander asked. "We're not talking the Trump family here, are we?"

"They're the evil dead," Helga told him. "Possessed by evil spirits. They're zombies two point oh."

"Ghouls are not easy to create," Giles said. "There shouldn't be many of them."

Helga scoffed. "There shouldn't be so many zombies either. Somebody threw out the rule book, Rupert. We're fucked."

"And not in the good way, I take it?" Marc asked, although it sounded rhetorical. He tossed Xander a new ammo clip for his gun, and then asked, "What do these freakazoids do?"

"They eat flesh," Helga told them. "Preferably Human, but they don't get picky about it. They actually eat zombies."

"Something eats zombies?" Xander exclaimed, too surprised to keep it to himself. Sure, he could imagine sharks noshing on zombies, but sharks weren't too picky about their meals.

She nodded. "They're higher on the demonic food chain. There's always something that kills something else. You have to go all the way up to Berserkers before that line ends. And really that only applies to this dimension. They're fast, they're nasty, they eat like bulimics who forget to purge. Head shots will kill them, but that's about it. We should probably group together, make us less of a target."

"Good idea," Marc agreed. "Back to back."

They did that, standing back to back in the center of the street, and they had just gotten settled when the first ghouls appeared around the corner.

Xander had been expecting more zombies, but that's not what appeared. Sure, they looked kind of Human, but their heads were bloated, as tight as packed sausage skins, the eyes bulging out of their sockets like something was pressing from behind, trying to get out. The jaw was distended too, oversized and full of rows of demonic teeth, and their hands all ended with long, talon like fingernails, the knuckles all swollen and knobby like golf balls. Blood and drool leaked from their gaping mouths, and when they let out their ear piercing shrieks, their mouths seemed to get even wider, in defiance of all laws of physics. "Holy fuck," Xander exclaimed. "Are they all mouth?"

"Not quite," Helga replied. "But almost."

Saddiq broke away from the line and started down the street. "They can't hurt me," he said. "I'll take out as many as I can."

"They could go for your eyes," Giles warned.

"I'll be careful," he answered, without any concern.

Suddenly the shrieking ghouls came running for them, maybe two dozen deep, all as ugly as the next one. Saddiq sped up to a run, but even Xander could tell from here that he was totally outnumbered, and many would get past him even if he wasn't hurt.

"Aim carefully," Marc said, taking aim himself. "Don't waste too many shots."

"Oh sure," Xander agreed sarcastically, trying to get a bead on at least one of the moving targets. Their big heads were a help, but not nearly as much as they should have been.

Now would have been an excellent time for Bob and company to reappear. It was kind of a shame they didn't.


	7. Chapter 7

7

Bob must have decided he was tired of walking, or maybe he just didn't want to risk a trip back in the Below, because he teleported them all back to the Way Station. And it was the one in their dimension, which Logan knew not only from the smell, but from the ghost of the Franciscan monk standing in Bob's office, looking more lost than anyone ever had. He asked, in Portuguese, "Is this Hell?"

Logan glanced at him, wondering how old he was when he died – he looked maybe fifteen, although perhaps vows of chastity were good for the skin – and told him, in his language, "No, it's Los Angeles, but I understand the mistake."

The monk took one look at Rogue, still in Brachen blue-green, and backed away in wide eyed horror, until he was through the wall and out of the office. She must have noticed, because she said, "Well fuck you too, asshole."

"Monks give me the creeps," Kier admitted. "Even chipmunks. Can't stand 'em."

"Even Chip and Dale?" Bren asked, clearly feeding his boyfriend a line.

"Especially Chip and Dale."

"Can we focus for once?" Logan groused. "We need a plan. Remember, book, Jean, zombie massacre?"

"We've dealt with worse things," Rogue pointed out.

"Only in a technical sense."

"Why don't we just go without you?" Kier suggested to Bob. "Get us there, and leave the rest to us."

Bob shook his head, sitting in his desk chair, which creaked like the deck of an old ship. "He'll just kill you. He's a paranoid old coot of a god; he doesn't take to trespassers."

"Can we call in Degei on this?" Logan asked. "No one can't touch him."

Doyle, who had been loitering in the far corner with his ghost cigarette, finally piped up. "Why not bribe 'im?"

They all looked at him curiously, and the sudden attention made him visibly nervous. "With what?" Logan asked. "Dead kids?"

"No," he replied defensively. "I dunno what he likes, but ... everybody likes somethin', right? Why we gotta go in fightin' when a well placed twenty to the bouncer could get us in the door?"

It wasn't a bad idea. Logan shot Bob a questioning look, and he shrugged faintly, considering it. "Well, Yama likes buffaloes," Bob offered.

Doyle snapped his fingers, which surprisingly made a noise. "Buffalo wings! Tell me it's buffalo wings."

"Er, no. Big, smelly water buffalo."

"Tell me it's not like in the Biblical sense," Kier immediately replied, and Bren shuddered in revulsion.

"I didn't actually ask," Bob told him. "But I'd really hope not. Do you know what they smell like?"

"Wet dog beds dragged through a musk foundry," Logan said, before realizing that yes, he knew what water buffaloes smelled like. How did he know that? Something to think about another time. "Come on, Bob, there's gotta be something. Even I know I can bribe you with a beer or a funny t-shirt."

"Not a funny one," Bob corrected sternly. "A weird one. Or something very silly. I don't truck with the usual." As if to prove that, he was suddenly wearing a tank top depicting a gorilla in aviator glasses riding an ostrich. Did he even want to know what the hell that was about?

"You wouldn't know usual if it bit you on the ass and called you daddy," Logan said.

"Leave my kids out of this," Bob replied, giving him a big, shit eating grin.

"And you're a god, huh?" Doyle responded, clearly confused and slightly off put by all of this.

Bob shrugged with his hands, an expansive gesture. "I never said I was a good one."

"Focus!" Rogue exclaimed, clicking her tongue and rolling her eyes as she crossed her arms over her chest. "Christ, why did I wanna come along again?"

"For the action," Bren reminded her.

"I take it back."

"Death -"

"- gods -"

"- like death -"

"-so why -"

"- don't we give -"

"- him some?" The Sisters suggested.

"There's been enough killing. The amount necessary to get his attention would probably have to be global genocide. And no, girls, don't even joke about such a thing." Bob sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. Could Bob pick up the telepathic communication - or whatever it actually was – between the Sisters? Logan kind of wondered, but Bob never really gave him a straight answer about it. About anything really; a straight answer from Bob was pretty rare.

"So what," Doyle asked, scratching his head. "Do we bust into a zoo and steal a water buffalo?"

Bob got this look in his eye that Logan knew all too well, and always kind of hated. It was inspiration, the look he got when he figured something out, and strangely enough, it was never a good thing. It should have been, but somehow it wasn't. It generally meant ugly things were going to happen. He sat forward, looking at the Sisters, and said, "You have to betray me."

"Okay," they agreed, with big, empty smiles.

"What?" Logan asked. "You know yer gonna hafta explain yourself."

He did, without protesting in even a joking manner. That too was rare. "Okay, here's the deal. The Sisters can attempt to make contact with him, with the express purpose of killing me and getting me out of the way. Yama shouldn't have a problem doing a deal with the dead, 'cause, well, death god. He controls dead things, so vampires are never gonna be a threat to him in any form. And he hates me, so he'll totally be down with me seeing me dead, even if only briefly. That way we set him him up for a trap."

"Which is ..?" Logan encouraged.

"I'm working on that."

"Er, umm, do we trust the Gaga Twins here?" Doyle asked, then added, "No offense."

The Sisters just grinned at him. "None -"

"- taken."

Yeah, somehow that even seemed sinister.

"I do, yeah," Bob said. "The girls always do right by me."

"There -"

"- is -"

"- a problem -"

"- what's our -"

"- motivation?"

"You're vampires. No offense, but you don't need one."

"They might," Logan interjected. "They're really devoted to you. Why would they suddenly decide to kill you? What if he doesn't accept vampire nature as enough of an excuse?"

"What's -"

"- in -"

"- it for -"

"- us?"

"I have the funny feeling of being back in acting class again," Kier said. "If someone asks me to become the truth in the moment, I'm just gonna run screaming from the room." Bren patted his shoulder in affectionate comfort.

Logan realized he had an answer, although could he get it past a god? He didn't know. He wasn't that good of an actor. But it was a good reason, especially if Yama had as low an opinion of humanity as most gods did. "I want your power."

Bob looked at him sharply. "What?"

"As your avatar, when you die on this plain, your power shifts to me. I want it. I want to fix the world. I want to fix Jean, I want to bring back ..." he verbally stumbled and paused, feeling the slightest mental hitch at even saying her name. "Mariko. I wanna life, and the only way I get it is through god power. The Sisters can have whatever they want if they help me, but I wanna be done with your shit. I don't want to be your errand boy, I don't wanna be your horseman -" (He still had to ask Bob what that was about .) "- I don't wanna be a fucking superhero or Wolverine or an X-Man. I want a life apart from this, apart from all this bullshit and all of you. And the only way I get it is if I'm the god and I write the rules."

Everybody was staring at him now, except for the Sisters, who each took one of his arms, entwining their arm with his. "That's -"

"- perfect -"

" - we like -"

"- you too -"

"- and we want -"

"- a pony."

He gave one of them – Beatrice or Belinda, he didn't know and honestly didn't care – a scowl. "Gonna need to ask for something serious, darlin'. Pony ain't gonna fly, no matter how crazy you are."

"How -"

"- about -"

"- a centaur?"

"Did you mean that?" Rogue asked, sounding surprised and looking just a little bit hurt. She was addressing him, not the Weirds."It sounded like you meant it."

"I believe him," Kier said.

"Who's Mariko?" Doyle asked.

Bob had simply been staring at Logan all this time in something like shock, and he continued to even as he stood up. "Fuck, mate, that's brilliant. What is all this but a pain in the ass?"

"A nightmare," Logan agreed, without sarcasm.

Bob nodded. "And it's not like you can get out of being an avatar simply 'cause you dislike it. It doesn't work like that. The problem is, once I die and you get my powers, I may still try and claim them back. Regeneration, reincarnation, whatever you wanna call it."

Logan nodded this time. The great thing about this script? He didn't even need to do that much faking. It pretty much wrote itself. "And that's where I need Yama's help. I need a way to kill you and make you stay dead, so I have your powers without the problem of you."

"The middle man."

"And I know of your history, kinda, 'cause you mentioned it once."

"And -"

"- we -"

"- knew because -"

"- we know -"

"- a lot of -"

"- shit and we -"

"- liked the odds of -"

" - this battle. Teamed up -"

"- we're unbeatable, even by Bob," the girls agreed, giving his arms friendly squeezes. Or maybe they were copping a feel of his muscles, hard to say.

"There is one quibble," Bob pointed out. "Bit of a minor hiccup. If Yama senses the lie in your mind, if he picks up even a whiff of betrayal, he will tear you to pieces. And this is a god, so no hand to hand battle, he'll just blow you up like a turkey stuffed with C4. You regenerate like a dream, mate, but I don't see you comin' back from that."

"What a mental image," Kier said, wincing slightly.

"Why ain't you worried about the Psycho Twins?" Doyle wondered.

"Their thought patterns are ... unusual," Bob said diplomatically.

"We're -"

"- bugfuck -"

"- nuts," The Sisters told the ghost cheerfully.

"It's like trying to pick up a faint radio signal amongst a tidal wave of static," Bob explained. "You pick up things now and again, but bits and pieces, nothing coherent, nothing linear. If you concentrate, you can eventually find a semi-cogent thought stream, but you hafta really wanna, and I don't see Yama giving that much of a shit. They're dead, they're in his realm of control, so he's not gonna be overly concerned with their intent to betray or lack of it. It's Logan he's going to scrutinize like the fine print at the bottom of a pre-nup."

Again, the answer was obvious, but he knew no would want to say it, least of all Bob. It wasn't like he was eager to say it either, but if this was going to work, he was going to have to be willing to take one for the team. Isn't that what he always did? He was the guy with the healing factor; he always took several ones for the team. It was his role – Human shield. He would just have to suck it up and take another one. "So we change my mind," Logan said.

The look Bob gave him was slightly scolding and very paternal. "Mate -"

"Brainwash me, or make me crazy," he told him. "Turn me into an animal."


	8. Chapter 8

8

"Could everyone else leave the room? I need to talk to Logan."

It wasn't a request, it was a push, which was the only reason everybody else left without a word. As soon as they were gone, Bob jumped up to his feet, and snapped, "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"To some degree," Logan admitted. "Not nearly enough for our purposes."

"You're inviting me to fuck with your mind. Hasn't your mind been fucked enough?"

He shrugged, trying to assume a nonchalance he didn't really feel. "At least I'm asking to be mindfucked. That's a first."

"That doesn't make it any better. You know as well as I do you your psyche is ..."

"Fucked?"

"Fragile. I know how you feel about that word, but it is. You've been crazy before."

He winced at that, but it was the truth; he couldn't dispute it. "And I've gotten better. More or less."

"It's left scars."

"You won't. You can erase them, can't you? Just tell me they're gone and they will be. Is there something wrong with this plan? Will it not work?"

Bob glared at him, his eyes seemingly glowing a brighter cobalt. "If anything's gonna work, that'll be it."

"So what's the problem?"

He sighed and shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. "You're just gonna be a macho asshole about this, huh? Are you thinking clearly at all? If I do this, you can do things with your power that might be hard to take back."

"Hard, but not impossible. Or did you stop being a reality warper?"

He looked faintly disgusted with him. "Really? All you care about is this working? The ends justifying the means? I know you have a martyr complex, but jeeze -"

"Are you actually gonna claim you've never fucked with my mind before? I can't prove you've pushed me, but come on, you must have at some point."

Bob just glared at him. "This is more than a push. This is fundamentally fucking with you. I'll have to flip a switch in your nature."

"One that's been flipped before, by people with much worse intentions."

He threw up his hands, either conceding the point or letting him have the argument - he couldn't say which. "So that's it?"

"You're just releasing my id, more or less. Do you how much I want to stop this shit?"

"Yeah, I know." He sighed, and admitted, "I don't like using you as a weapon."

"You have before."

"Not like this."

He shrugged. It wasn't that he didn't have some apprehensions, it was just that he thought it wouldn't ultimately matter. If he couldn't remember this, or if he could remember this with the knowledge that this was the only thing that could be done, it wouldn't be so bad. "Sometimes you gotta do bad things to beat bad people."

"Your motto."

"According to Scott, my motto was 'Kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out'. Except that would be you, wouldn't it?"

"I'd go for someone else. I don't do the clerical work." Bob smiled faintly at his own joke, then his expression fell, and his eyes glowed a seriously distracting blue.

And then Logan forgot everything.

****

Bren wondered if he was going to have to hold Rogue back.

They loitered outside in the corridor, ghosts wandering by, the music from the jukebox ebbing and flowing, reflecting the tensions in the bar. Rogue wanted to storm back into Bob's office and find out what he and Logan were discussing, but something seemed to be holding her back. He wasn't sure if it was something Bob did, or her own fear that she wouldn't like what was going on in there. "Why did we leave?" she raged, not for the first time. Her teal was fading, and her red spikes were gone, suggesting his remaining power was draining away from her. Good, he supposed, as he had this sneaking suspicion that Rogue would be a much better Brachen than he was. Maybe it was just from absorbing Logan so many times, but she seemed like a gal who liked a good scrap. "His plan's insane. He volunteered to get his mind fucked!"

"My guess is we were all pushed," Bren said.

The Sisters nodded. "Good - "

"- guess."

"Pushed?" Doyle asked. He was one of the few ghosts sticking around and not drifting through the walls. So far Bren had noticed a ghost dressed like an eighteenth century milkmaid, a very rustic Native American, and a guy in a lime green leisure suit. He felt bad for the guy in the leisure suit - imagine spending the rest of eternity dressed like that.

"Bob has this thing where he can just say something and make it happen," Kier told him. "He could make us all juggle chainsaws if he wanted."

"But I'm intangible," he replied, passing his hand through the wall, on the very slim chance they'd forgotten. "How could he do that to me?"

"God, remember? He can do whatever he wants." Rogue said, still fuming. She shot an evil look at the closed door of his office, for all the good that would do. Bren relaxed; there must have been an enchantment on the door or a caveat in Bob's push, as she couldn't go in his office or she'd have done so by now. He also noted, with great relief, that the marks on his arms had seemed to calm down until they simply resembled tattoo sleeves again. (Or so he thought - there was no mirror here, so he couldn't check to see if it had grown on his face.)

Doyle chomped on his ghost cigarette - it seemed if there was a way to light it, he hadn't figured it out yet - and admitted, "Y'know, him bein' a god explains a lot of things I've heard about him. Everybody always said you messed with Maximum Bob at your own peril, but no one could explain why. Maybe they couldn't say 'cause he wouldn't let 'em."

"Or they didn't know," Kier said. "He can make you forget. He can make you think you're a Cher impersonator with a troublesome addiction to glazed donuts. In fact, I'm fairly certain that's what happened to Benny Matsuda."

"Benny the Badger?" Doyle exclaimed in shock. Bren had no idea who this person was, but Kier had associated with some unsavory sorts before they crossed paths, so he just assumed this was one of them. "No fucking way."

"Yeah. I thought I saw him a couple months ago at an all night donut shop just off Sunset, in a Bob Mackie gown. Couldn't explain it."

"Are you making this up?" Rogue asked.

It was Doyle who shook his head. "Benny was a minor crime boss who ran some gambling pits in North Hollywood. Mean son of a bitch. Ugly too." After thinking about it a moment, he said, "Cher, really? I don't see it." He paused briefly. "Babe Ruth maybe ..."

The door to the office opened, and Bob stepped out, firmly shutting the door behind him. "Okay, look -"

Rogue lunged for him, but Bob shouted, "Freeze!" and she stood rooted to the spot. "You can't be fucking with his mind," she shouted. "Don't you know what could happen?! He's been fucked with so many times. I've been him, and let me tell you, it fucking hurts! You wouldn't -"

And then Bren suddenly lost the plot.

****

"Sisters, don't hear this," Bob said. "Forget the plan. I have a secret plan I've left you out of because it's god stuff. You don't like it, but you will grudgingly accept it. You know nothing of the betrayal of Logan and the Sisters, you don't know it's part of the plan. Things are normal beyond the immediate problem." He looked at the Sisters, and asked, in his normal voice, "Silent running girls, right?"

"Roger -"

"- wilco," they responded, giving him stereo mock salutes.

Wow, there were so many things that could go wrong with this plan it wasn't funny. And a big part of the problem was Logan. Yes, he wanted to be free of all of this shit, he wanted nothing but peace and silence, and he was an extremely formidable fighter. Given god power, he could rip the Earth in half and start over with a planet all his own.

He hoped it didn't come to that. But he thought he should have a back up plan ready, just in case Logan inadvertently destroyed everything.

****

Bren was sure something wasn't right, but he couldn't put his finger on what. Beyond the obvious.

They followed Bob out to the main bar, grumbling somewhat over being left out of the loop. So it was a "god stuff" plan, meaning they couldn't know about it for some damn reason. Sure, Bob had his reasons, but nobody liked it. But what shocked him was Logan going along with it. Since when would he allow Bob to keep him out of the loop? He looked like he was glowering, but he said nothing. The Sisters seemed to stick close to him, but maybe that was a good thing. Bren was fairly certain he didn't want the Sisters within arm's length of him. God, they were creepy. Oh sure, they were theoretically "good guys" now, but that didn't stop you from having the feeling you were carpooling with Hannibal Lecter and his even eviler twin.

They decided to have drinks before heading off to see how bad it was outside, and Bob volunteered to get them for them. He seemed a bit glum and preoccupied as he retrieved the beers (a goat's blood for Kier and the Sisters), and briefly sang along with the jukebox, but under his breath. "We don't need a doctor, we need a victim, we need a sacrifice." Wow, that sounded really cheerful.

But when Bob slammed the drinks on the bar, he had a smile pasted on his face. "Come on, drink up. The world could be ending soon."

A horned demon at the end of the bar looked startled. "Is it really? I only have one car payment left! This is so unfair."

"I said could, mate."

He'd started to get off his stool, but that made him sit down again. "Oh. Good."

Logan gulped his beer back in a single drink, which was typical for him, but Bren sort of expected him to jump to his feet and tell everyone else to get a move on. But he didn't. He just sat there, brooding over his empty mug. Oh no, was he in a mood? When Logan got in a mood, you didn't want to be within fifty feet of him. Kier once suggested these moods were probably related to post traumatic stress disorder, and the fact that everyone let him fight was probably a bad thing since what he actually needed was therapy. He couldn't dispute that, but he couldn't see Logan in therapy either. (It would probably be the only group therapy session on record to end with a mass slaughter, or at least with everyone running out of the room screaming in terror.)

Rogue sipped her drink, and then put it down, making a face at it. "What the hell is this?"

"Ginger beer."

"I want beer beer," she snapped.

"I'll have it," Kier volunteered. "I used to love that stuff as a Human."

"We're discussin' drinks?" Doyle asked. Maybe he was jealous he couldn't have one. "Shouldn't we get out there and kill some zombies?"

"We, kemosabe?" Logan grumbled. "You're intangible."

"I'd kill 'em if I could."

"Oi, mate, watch it," a familiar voice cried, coming in the door. It was Rags, here for his annual afternoon drinkathon. He gave him a friendly nod as he sidled up to his usual stool. He didn't even have to ask – Bob slid him a Long Island iced tea. "Surprised you guys ain't out dealin' with the ghouls."

"Ghouls?" Kier asked, eyes widening in horror. Scare a vampire? Yeah, generally not a good sign there.

"Yeah, they're arsin' about the downtown core; I had to teleport to avoid 'em. I mean, normally they wouldn't eat my kind, but I dunno 'ow desperate they are."

"Oh fuck," Bob exclaimed. "Yama unleashed ghouls? The bastard."

"What're ghouls?" Rogue asked for most of them.

"Cannibals with limitless appetites," Bob said. Yeah, that sounded really cheerful too. "Or zombies on crack, if you will."

"They'll eat anything," Kier added. "As long as it bleeds something. Doesn't even have to be blood."

"Charming," Bren said, putting his drink down. Actually he needed stronger alcohol, or maybe something stronger than alcohol. Was it a bad time to take up heroin? They probably didn't have time for it.

"Shit," Bob said, dropping his bar rag. "Angel."

Logan looked at him sharply. "Think he's a target?"

"He worked for the Powers, right? Hell yeah he's a target." And the world shifted and slid sideways, and before Bren realized what was happening he was standing at the end of a street that smelled rank with blood, burnt flesh, and cordite, and seemed paved with dead, dismembered bodies. He tensed instantly, Brachen side coming out for what looked like a hopeless fight. (And since it was day still, of course Bob left the Sisters back at the bar, thinning their ranks when they could least afford it.)

The living ghouls turned and shrieked at them, bloated bipeds that looked as grotesque as anything in a Sam Raimi horror film, but as they ran for them, Bob simply said, "Die and stay dead." They all dropped in their tracks, as if an invisible scythe cut through them all at once, and Bren sighed in relief. Sometimes he forgot that sometimes, with a god on your side, you didn't need to lift a finger.

"Marc?" Logan suddenly called out, heading down the street and sniffing the air. He turned and sneezed, but went back to trying to smell him out in spite of the smoke and blood. (Marc being here would explain the cordite smell.)

"Helga?" Bob called out. "Hel hon, where are you?"

Where was everyone? With the ghouls all dead, they should have stood out. Unless ... oh no, that couldn't have happened. "Angel?" Bren shouted. "Giles?"

Relief was instantly displaced by panic. There was no way in hell they were dead, right?

So if they weren't dead or in the belly of a ghoul, where the fuck were they?


	9. Chapter 9

9

There was movement on the far side of the street, a pile of dead (?) ghouls suddenly moving, but while Logan tensed, Bob said, "Don't worry, you know him."

With a grunt of effort, the ghoul was shifted aside, and Saddiq was revealed beneath the pile of bodies. He was covered with blood, all of it someone else's. "I keep forgetting I can get knocked out," Saddiq admitted sheepishly, as Logan helped him to his feet. Bren wished he had that problem; he never forgot he could get knocked out, 'cause he got knocked out all the time. He figured he and Giles should have a head injury support group.

"Where is everybody?" Logan and Saddiq asked each other at roughly the same time. Then they frowned at each other.

"Okay," Bob said. "They all disappeared whilst you were at the bottom of a ghoul dog pile. Where were they when you saw them last?"

"Over there," Saddiq said, pointing towards the far end of the street, where there was a large pile of ghoul bodies around an empty patch of asphalt. That made sense – they picked their area to make a stand and defended it.

"What's the last thing you remember?" Bob asked.

Saddiq wiped blood off his face, and retrieved one of his swords, which was sticking out of the center of one of the closest bodies. "Being picked up and thrown into a brick wall."

"From the others," Bob clarified.

He had to think about it a moment. "Gunshots. Marc was shouting to someone – Xander? Mat? Giles? - that they were getting too close. He was offering to cover them ..." he paused, staring off into space. "I don't remember what happened after that."

"Bob, is that you?" A very faint voice called out, seemingly from below the street. It was Angel, still in the sewers. As they headed that way, his phone hummed in his pocket, and Bren answered it to find Kier on the other end of the line – Bob had left him back at the bar too. He asked what was happening, and he filled him in on the whole lot of nothing. It took ten seconds.

"If Marc was offerin' to cover 'em, he had an escape route, or at least thought he did," Logan grumbled. As the rest of the them climbed down into the sewer, Logan remained sniffing the air above ground, trying to get a directional fix. From the way the frown gouged deeper into his face, he wasn't picking it up. And he was getting moodier by the second. What bug was up his butt? He was starting to radiate his most poisonous attitude, the one that said he was about to snap, and Bren was tempted to hide behind Rogue. (Yeah, he might snap, but he probably wouldn't lash out at her.) For once, he was happy to duck into the sewer.

There were many dead ghouls here as well, just adding to the wonderful smell. Angel was slightly less bloodier than Saddiq, but his coat was torn, one sleeve hanging by less than a dozen threads, and his arm was bleeding from a wound the looked suspiciously like a bite mark. A ghoul tried to eat a vampire? Well, why not? They ate zombies. Bob had said they were cannibals – they ate fellow demons along with your average human schmuck.

"What happened up there?" Angel asked, his gaze laser focused on Saddiq.

"As I was telling them, I don't know," he said, almost sounding frustrated. And from robo-assassin Sid (as he and Rogue sometimes referred to him in e-mails), that was the equivalent of a normal person throwing a chair through a window, or Logan taking out half of the Eastern seaboard.

Angel's recount shed no new light on the matter, but unlike Sid he was conscious and aware the moment things went wrong. "The shooting stopped," Angel said. "I thought maybe Marc had paused to reload, but it went on way too long. He has reloading down to a science; he can do it under two seconds and barely miss a beat. I thought maybe they got overrun, but someone would have screamed. Could Giles have cast a spell?"

"To do what? Teleport them away?" Bob shook his head. "I didn't get a sense of that kind of magic."

"So where are they?"

"Nobody takes Marc without a fight," Logan said. He was on the ladder leading down into the sewer, but remained near the top, looking down on all of them. "Unless they get him before he can."

Bob looked up at him, his expression oddly blank. "You have an intuition you'd like to share?"

"Yama."

That made Angel raise an eyebrow. "What?"

"Why would he take them?" Bob asked."To what end?"

Logan gave Bob a surprisingly nasty look. "Yer the god. You tell me."

"He wouldn't take them. Kill them maybe, but not take. There's no point in that."

"Yeah, 'cause gods never do anything pointless or inexplicable," Logan replied sourly.

"I'll give you that. But he wouldn't bother, Logan. Trust me."

"Why should I?"

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Rogue snapped, glaring at Logan. "Why are you gettin' up his ass? He's trying to help."

Bren had held his phone out so Kier could hear the conversation, but he now heard him saying something, his voice a tinny whisper, like an angry gnat. He brought the phone up to his ear and asked, "What?"

"Has anyone tried to call anybody?" Kier repeated. "You know, ring their cells?"

Oh holy fuck. Why hadn't he thought of that? So he interrupted the argument to share the idea, and they all called someone different.

This was a great idea for the length of time it took to make the calls, and then receive the same automated message that the phones they were calling were not currently in service. So they were all somewhere where their phones weren't working. That wasn't good.

Bob dry washed his face, and admitted, "This isn't right. Something else is going on here besides Yama."

"Prove it."

"I will. Now are you gonna stop being a dickhead?"

Angel looked between Logan and Bob, as uncomfortable and startled as the rest of them. "Guys, we need to focus on finding them, not fighting between ourselves. Isn't the end of the world enough problems for one day?"

"Well, if you wanna be technical, the world isn't ending, it's just being overrun with dead people," Bob told him.

Wasn't that bad enough? But Bren wasn't sure. Because if there was something going on with Logan, maybe that was even worse.

* * *

Marcus going missing was really the final straw.

Oh, he was done with Bob and all his shit before it, but Marc going missing was just a step too far. Did that asshole Yama take them hostage? Fuck, maybe he turned him into a pigeons. Gods could do shit like that, right? He was done, fucking done. He wasn't losing another friend to some stupid, endless battle that really had nothing to do with them.

Logan knew he probably should have stayed back and helped Angel and Saddiq, who were doing their best to piece together what may have happened in that odd gap between the others being there and then suddenly disappearing, but Logan knew a wild goose chase when he fell over one. Bob was gone, doing whatever it was he was bothering to do (ostensibly trying to track them down, but did he believe that?) and Logan was happy to stomp off, seemingly in a huff. Or at least that's what Rogue believed, and he was content to let her, because at least that guaranteed she wouldn't follow him.

When he was sure he was clear of the others, he phoned the Sisters, who told him where to meet them. It turned out to be a little place in the warehouse district, not too far from Bob's warehouse loft place (although not close enough for it to be a concern). He smelled blood before sliding open the metal door that functioned as a back entrance, and he found a warehouse about the size of your average split level, dark as night and reeking strongly of old blood. Animal blood by the smell; mostly cows, but there were many chickens and pigs that had been here as well, some lambs, a goat or two. He knew it was an old slaughterhouse or meat packing plant before he found the sisters waiting for him in the remains of an old, unplugged walk in freezer. "Appropriate -"

"- no?"

"What's with all the theater?" he snapped, but he belatedly realized he shouldn't have bothered asking. They were crazy and perverse, a devastating combination, especially in a couple of the undead.

They grinned at him vacuously, their eyes glittering in the jittery light of the candles. They'd set the place like a stage, an altar, with candles in a rough circle and axis formation. A pentagram? Maybe. It was hard to tell. There was something drawn on the floor, but the light was too inconstant for him to focus on it right now. He knew it was drawn in ash, blood (human – where they got it from he wasn't going to ask), chalk, salt, and cinnamon (that was the truly inexplicable element), and spread out across most of the freezer floor. The Sisters were standing near the back, clear of the circle. "Contacting -"

"- Yama -"

"- isn't easy -"

"- his realm -"

"- is beyond easy -"

"- access, there's a -"

"- strict protocol to contacting -"

"- him, and even if -"

"- we're precise, he could still -"

"- kill us all. He's not -"

"- one of the fluffy muffin gods."

"Yeah, I got that. Is there any other way to do this?"

"No," they answered in stereo.

"That's what I thought. So let's do this." He stripped off his coat and tossed it in an empty corner, then pulled off his shirt to a chorus of appreciative and deeply creepy "oohs" from the Sisters. He scowled at them, but they just smiled back, like they always did. He approached the circle carefully, not smudging any of the lines or knocking over any candles, and sat down cross legged in the center. One of the Sisters handed him a knife, which was ornate and clearly ceremonial, with a bunch of fake (?) gems lined up along the hilt in an erratic zig zag pattern, and the blade curved until it was nearly a semi-circle, ending in a wickedly sharp point.

He nodded to let them know he was ready, and they began chanting something in a language he didn't understand – probably a demon tongue – and started throwing charred bones (Human) ground into ash around the circle while Logan slashed a wrist with the knife and let the blood pool on the floor, holding the tip of the knife in his flesh.

Communicating with Yama was all about the blood ritual apparently, and the more death the better, so that's where the charred bones came in. Where the cinnamon fit into this tableau he had no idea, but he trusted the Sisters when they said they knew the ritual of contacting him.

Was this a mistake? Probably. But he was sick of it all, and the deaths had to stop. He had a feeling Bob would actually understand this, but there was no way in fucking hell he was going to discuss it. Bob had his time, he'd had a good run, and he was never much of a god to begin with. Sometimes you had to know when to hang it up, when you were doing more harm than good. He wondered who would pull the trigger for him, and wondered if he could do it himself.

The flesh healed, and actually it attempted to heal around the tip of the knife, making him have to move it and rip open his skin. He wasn't sure if he had enough blood on the floor. People usually bled more without healing factors. He almost asked the Sisters how much he was supposed to bleed, except they were chanting and he was pretty sure he couldn't (or at least shouldn't) interrupt them.

This went on for maybe five minutes that seemed like a century. He watched the shadows on the wall, flickering shapes created by the candle flames, and knew the smoke and blood was getting to him when the shadows seemed to move independently of the flames. The wall directly across from him, for example. It looked like a shadow had clung to the very top of the wall and was now oozing down, like paint, like blood ...

... wait, down? How did the shadow of a stationary candle move persistently downwards? He was wondering if it was blood loss when the world seemed to shift sideways, and he found himself somewhere else.

There was no actual transition; he was just in one place, and then he was in another. The Sisters were gone, the knife was gone, the old slaughterhouse was gone. He was no longer sitting either.

Best he could tell, he was inside an active volcano, with rock walls on all sides of him reaching up and away, tapering into a point high above him, the rock as black as pitch. There was a reddish glow somewhere beneath him, but it couldn't have been lava, as he'd have been burnt to a crisp. Still, he did smell his own skin baking, and he was hot enough that he'd have moved away if that had been an option. But it wasn't an option, as he was impaled on what he assumed to be some kind of spears. There was one going through each ankle, through each wrist, and one sticking out of the center of his body, just above the solar plexus. They hurt, but they hurt so much they almost canceled each other out; the pain was so great his pain receptors had pretty much shut down. And considering he felt every bit of liquid adamantium poured into his body, that was an impressive amount of pain. He was pinned inside a volcanic crater like a mounted rare butterfly in an entomologist's collection.

Maybe this was a cartoon version of a volcano; maybe Yama was giving him what a Human thought the inside of a volcano looked like. It wasn't above gods to sculpt their realms to fit perceptions. Except Logan knew this wasn't what the inside of a volcano looked like. A mind game?

A disembodied voice, deep, sepulchral, and vaguely Satanic, suddenly boomed, "Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you now."

He was tempted to reply, _'Yama I presume_,' but he had a feeling that would get him very dead very fast.

Then again, what wouldn't?


	10. Chapter 10

10

If these were going to be his last words, these were going to suck. But then again, they were still better than "oops". "I'm sick and tired of being Bob's avatar. I wanna be Bob, and I figure you're the guy to help me do it."

For a very long moment, nothing happened. There was no noise, no movement beyond the random flickering of the light beneath him. Logan wondered if he would even know if he was dead. This seemed pretty hellish. Although, if his past experience taught him anything, it was that hell was simply a dimension imposed on you, and usually a god or a supernatural connection of a similar type was the only way to get a ticket to someone else's dimension. But if he died while summoning Yama, would that override his connection to Bob? Maybe. He didn't know, but he now realized he almost didn't care. At least if he was honestly dead, no matter where he was, no one would expect anything from him.

Then the landscape changed. Logan found himself now sitting up, not impaled, on a bare metal floor. His hands were shackled behind his back, and chained to the floor, in such a way that even if he popped his claws, he wouldn't be able to cut through the chains. Well, he was a god – he would think of everything.

Now water was filling the room, and Logan had time to wonder what this was supposed to be before realizing that Yama had already found something he was afraid of: drowning. He'd done it before, of course, but he honestly hated it. There was no worse death than one by suffocation, especially when the suffocation was caused by water filling your lungs. It hurt when your lungs seized up, but even worse was the panic. Your brain just freaked out when deprived of oxygen, when liquid was coming in when it shouldn't. You could tell yourself to be calm, to stay calm, but your brain fought it all the way.

It was lukewarm water, the temperature of blood, and he wondered if that was a deliberate choice as it began to build rapidly, already up to his waist. "What the fuck is this?"

"You insult my intelligence with an obvious trap?" The disembodied voice boomed, as the water kept rising.

"It's not a trap! Even we're not that dumb."

"That's what you'd want me to think."

"Look into my head! I can't lie to you!"

The water stopped at about mid chest, and he was relieved, but he doubted it was over. After a very long moment, Yama asked, "Why now?"

"I've been tired of Bob for a long time, but he doesn't give a shit. Not like there's something I can do to stop being an avatar, is there? But he's scared of you. I can't kill Bob on my own. Or at least I can't kill him and have him stay dead. That's where you can help me. I gotta keep him dead long enough to ... to fix things. Then fuck, I don't care, tear me apart, whatever. But I want Bob gone, and I know you do too."

Logan waited, but there was nothing but silence, save for the sloshing of the water. Was Yama going to accept him, or was he a dead man?

He waited to find out.

* * *

There were days when Angel was sure he shouldn't have bothered to leave the hell dimension. This was turning out to be one of these days.

Saddiq was, bless him, the emotionless rock he almost always was, and was attempting to put together the information they had and reach a logical conclusion, but there was no logic to be had here. Rogue was furious at Logan for storming off like a "drama queen", Bren was visibly anxious but trying to work with Saddiq on spinning gold out of dung, and Kier was just lolling on the sofa, looking as calm as could be, probably because he never even tried to make sense of this. He may have been Canadian by birth, but he had the L.A. attitude down pat.

Bob was gone too, but that was expected. Rogue was pissed off Logan hadn't come back yet, but Angel figured Bob had found him and taken him wherever he went, whether he liked it or not. That was what Bob usually did.

But even as he said that, he wasn't sure. Bob was up to something, he knew that much, something odder than usual. Still, he was a god, and he knew by now that completely trusting a god, or trying to fathom their motives, was a useless waste of time. He could only hope that Logan wasn't getting caught in the crossfire.

Bren finally made a negative noise – not quite a curse, but close – and threw up his hands. "I give up. Can I give up now?"

"There must be something we're overlooking," Saddiq insisted.

"Like what?" Kier wondered, sounding more curious than anything. "Guys, you've done everything but lick the pavement. If Giles, Helga, or Marc could get in contact with us, they would've already."

Bren shot him a stern look. "So you're just giving up on them?"

"No. I'm just saying we should try to work some other angle. Okay, we have nothing, what does that mean?"

Rogue scowled at him. "You're goin' all Zen on us, aren't you?"

"No," Angel said, considering his point. "I get what he's saying."

"Can you fill us in then?" Bren asked.

"The lack of clues is a clue."

She rolled her eyes. "We know that."

"So who's powerful enough to take them all away, and why?" Kier urged. "What's the point?"

"A god could," Rogue replied. "Logan was right about that. It probably was that Llama guy."

"Yama," Saddiq corrected.

"Whatever."

"What about another kind of demon?" Kier asked. "We're being besieged by demons here."

Angel considered that as he crossed to the bookcase and looked for the demon bestiary that Giles kept there. "Maybe."

"Are there teleporting demons?" Rogue asked.

"Have we totally ruled out mutants?" Saddiq asked. A fair question.

Angel had just found the old tome when the office door opened, and a familiar voice exclaimed, "Holy shit, did I miss a wholesale demon slaughter or what? Marc said it was target practice, but I had no idea."

"Faith, hey," he said, surprised. He was shocked to see her, but he was also very glad. They needed all the firepower they could get. "When did Marc call you?"

She shrugged, her long brown hair sliding off her shoulders. She was wearing black denim and a yellow tank top with a silver sparkly number seventy three on it. It seemed to show off the new tattoo on her bared left arm, a Japanese kanji that he knew meant Faith. "Few hours ago. Just got back from Tokyo last night. I'd have been here sooner, but shit man, I had to fight my way from the Tagawa building to here. I can't even remember the last time I saw a ghoul. Where are they all coming from?"

"God shit," Bren replied dismissively, then gave her the shorthand version of what was going on. An advantage to having an experienced Slayer around was none of what she was told seemed to surprise her in the least, or even made her change expression.

"So where's Logan?" She wondered. Were they still a couple? Angel wasn't sure anymore. "Off with Bob?"

"Or brooding," Rogue said bitterly.

Faith just shrugged. "He does that. But he won't miss a fight. So what's our next move?"

"We're trying to figure that out," Kier said.

"Shouldn't we hurry up? Sundown's in an hour, and if the ghouls came out in this number, I'd hate to see how many vamps we're gonna get."

"It's that late?" He turned and checked the clock, and was stunned to see how late it was. Time was slipping away, almost as fast as everyone he'd ever known.

"We can't fight a battle with this small a group," Saddiq said, pointing out the obvious. "If we can't find Bob or Logan within the next twenty minutes, we need to call in the reserves."

"I agree," Angel replied. "Too bad we don't have a reserve."

Faith tried calling Logan on his cell, but much like them, she got the message that his phone was turned off. A call to the Way Station also wasn't productive.

After some debating over whether they should try to call in the X-Men for help – dicey, especially since they were probably defending New York – Faith sighed heavily, and fixed him with a knowing stare. "I never thought I'd say this, man, but desperate times and all that shit." She took a deep breath and seemed to steel herself. "Do you know how to contact Buffy?"

Angel now wondered if he had actually left the hell dimension at all.

* * *

Marc learned a long time ago that if you didn't know where you were, you played dead until you could get your bearings. Sometimes this scared one night stands, but hey, it was a risk you had to take.

What he heard was what he considered "green" sounds, wind through grass and tree branches, quiet noises of calm, and since he last remembered emptying clip after clip into rubber faced demon monstrosities in the middle of a Los Angeles street, this didn't track. After letting his ears confirm he was alone – or whoever was watching him was a master at not moving or breathing – he slowly reached for a gun he knew he had, and opened his eyes.

He still had the gun. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Namely, it was dark. Weird dark, though, not night dark. He could make out shapes and some colors through the smoky glass of his goggles, but that was it. It took him a moment to realize what the problem was: he was seeing everything as it really was, the goggles on his face included.

His infrared vision was gone.

Bracing for the worst headache of his life, he sat up and slid his goggles up to the top of his head, squinting in advance of the flood of bright light. But while the light flooded in, it wasn't the kind that would kill him. In fact, it was just normal daylight, a blue sky and yellow white sun illuminating a copse full of evergreens, where the trees were spread out just enough in irregular groupings to convince you none of these were planted deliberately. Canada?

But as he stood, looking around at everything, he realized there was no smell to anything. Oh, there was soon as he realized there wasn't, he started smelling plants and trees, but only because he expected to. What the hell was that? And now that he was wondering where the birds were, here came the bird sounds. Wrong.

He stood up and shoved the gun into the waistband of his pants. Probably wasn't going to help here, wherever here was. "Okay, I got it. You took my powers away so I couldn't see how phony all this was. That worked, didn't it?" He had no idea who he was talking to, but he didn't much care either. Captor would probably do for now as a descriptive. He wondered if he was still poisonous, but at the moment had no way to test it.

He started walking into the woods, wishing he had Logan's sense of smell, but hey, if this person (demon, god, whatever) could take away his infrared vision, it could've taken away Logan's sense of smell too. It was bizarre to see everything as it was, not by its heat or cold signature. Usually when he walked through the woods, he saw a billion different variations of signatures, the heat of decomposition contrasted with the ground's radiant heat, the warmth of a thousand different species, from worms to bugs to birds and raccoons and other beasties that few ever saw. But of course nothing living (or dead) could hide from his view for long, because everything reflected heat, had its own heat, or had no heat, meaning there were very few ways to hide from him. At first, when he was a teenager, it was a fucking pain in the ass trying to process all the visual information, it was like looking at the world through an abstract painting, but once he learned how to process it, what every variation in hue meant, he wasn't sure how normal people could live in a world where they didn't see things as they truly were. The surface of things was pretty, sure, but it was nothing; it told you nothing about the thing you were looking at, not beyond the basics. Now he felt like he was stuck in a 2-D world, and it was as disorienting as it was boring. "Mat?" he called out, not caring if he attracted attention. He wanted to attract attention; he wanted to know where he was and what he was dealing with.

This wasn't Canada, was it? A bit warm for Canada. Spain? Spain had some awesomely impressive forests. There was no way to tell right now, as he couldn't trust his sense of smell or hearing, and the undergrowth and trees were too generic, too global in their habitat, to be of much use. "Mat hon, c'mon. I'm sorry I called you fussy." Well, he was; Mat could be a bit of a priss, really. But beyond that he was one of the coolest guys he'd ever met.

Why would someone take them out of a battle and toss them into fake Spain, or wherever the fuck this mindfuck of a place was? Somehow he got the impression that Yama would kill them if he got the chance, what with being a death god and all. So why just punt them away? This wasn't Yama, was it? Damn it, he should have asked Logan how many friends Yama had and what they could do. Maybe this wouldn't have snuck up on them so much.

He reached for his phone, only to find it gone. So he was left with a gun (well, maybe two or three; he hadn't checked all his hiding places), but not a cell? Weird. So whoever they were, they weren't afraid of guns, but they were afraid of phones and infrared? That made no sense. Or maybe they overlooked the guns; maybe they didn't even know what they were. A god was supposed to know everything, but that didn't mean they couldn't be obtuse at times.

"Marcus, is that you?" A voice called out, but it wasn't Mat, 'cause it had a British accent.

"Yeah, it's me," he replied, following the general direction of the voice. He found Giles sitting on a fallen tree in a clearing, head in his hands. "You okay?"

"I'll live," he said with a sigh. "I just picked a bad day to have a cold." Giles then looked up at him, almost doing a double take, brow furrowing in concern. "What's happened to your eyes?"

"Are they all pupil?"

"It appears so."

"Nothin' then. That's how they look. It's just my infrared ain't working, so I didn't need the goggles. Christ on a crutch, I forgot how flat and uniform the world looks to you people. How do you stand it?"

"Your infrared isn't working? You're being blocked?"

He could only shrug. "Guess so. Something ain't working right. Otherwise I'm fine. You got your phone?"

Giles searched his pockets. "Have you been doing reconnaissance?"

"Not really, just trying to figure things out. There's no chance we're dead and this is an afterlife, is there?"

"I don't think so. I would be in a hell dimension."

"Yeah, well, I wouldn't be?"

"You've never communed with dark powers, so no." Giles stopped searching his pockets. "No phone. Do I guess yours is gone as well?"

"Yeah, but I got my gun. I think I may even have a concussion grenade. Explain that."

Giles gave him a quizzical look. "Why do you have a concussion grenade?"

He did a mock boycott salute, and said, "Always be prepared."

He raised his eyebrows, and assumed a very dry British look. "I see why Logan calls you."

"Hey, I'm a mutant. When the government comes to put me in a camp, they're gonna get a face full of missile. I never go quietly. It's bad for my image."

"Do you really think the government would round mutants up?"

"I think they'll try." In fact, sources he had within the military told him a basic plan had been mapped out for years. The problem was figuring out a way to get the mutants without massive property damage and "above nominal" casualties, a nut they hadn't fully cracked. Although it was unlikely they ever would, there was no way in hell he was betting on it.

Giles shrugged, but in a way that conceded the point, and then said something that sounded a bit like Latin, holding the palm of his hand up, as if expecting something to appear there. Nothing did, so he said the same thing again. The result was the same.

"Trying to do some magic?" Marc guessed. Giles just nodded. "So you're blocked too?"

"It would appear so."

"Is it possible to block magic?"

He had to think about it for a moment. "It is possible to create a "no magic" zone, but that in itself is magic, and takes so much power as to be absurd. I could have been stripped of my abilities, but I'd have felt that. The easier answer would be to ..." And here Giles hesitated, which you just knew was bad.

"Don't make me play twenty questions."

Giles fixed him with a very serious stare. "The easy answer is we were sent to a dimension with no magic. And no mutancy, it seems."

"Dimension? As in we're no longer on Earth anymore?"

"Not an Earth we would recognize."

He had considered the possibility of being punted across an ocean, but across realities? Holy shit. How were they supposed to get back? "On a scale of one to ten, how fucked are we?"

Giles considered that for a long moment, his lips thinning, and finally said, "Keep the concussion grenade handy."

Yeah, that's pretty much what he thought.


	11. Chapter 11

11

Was it disappointing or heartening that, no matter how old he got, he was still kid like in some ways?

No. Angel mentally corrected himself – not kid like, immature. That was probably more accurate. Kid like could be endearing, but immaturity never was.

He got Bren to call Willow and tell her what was going on. Faith gave him a look for that, and then said, "Ah, not on speaking terms, huh?" He was going to deny this – it wasn't that he wasn't on speaking terms with Buffy, it was just ... what the hell was there to say? They'd both gone on with their lives, and yes sure, he still loved her, but was that ever going to work? No. So part of him had simply decided "Why bother". It seemed like so much pain, and there seemed to be no way to win. So he'd given up. How heroic. Well, he'd never claimed to be completely heroic. He wanted to be, but that was different.

He'd gone in his office for a moment to get some weapons – hide out, actually, but what was the difference? - and had just sat down behind his desk to steel himself when Willow appeared right in front of the couch. "You're so busy you can't call yourself?"

It was half teasing, a partial joke, but of course she knew. It was funny that poor Willow would end up the go between, but it made so much sense. She had a peacemaker tendency, which was why her temper could be frightening when she finally had enough. It may have been a cliché, but it really always was the quiet ones you had to watch out for.

So he briefed her on what was going on, and while she refrained from comment, her facial expressions shifted enough to let him know that she honestly thought this was all kinds of screwed up. Which he already knew, but it was good of everyone to be on the same page. Once he was done, she ran a hand through her shoulder length red hair, and said, "I hate god shit."

"We all hate god shit."

"I could do a locator spell! Find Giles. Just a sec." She disappeared, and Angel had barely shifted in his chair before she reappeared, looking troubled.

"Didn't work?" he guessed.

She shook her head. "He's either being cloaked, or he's ... no, he's cloaked."

Yeah, that's what he was hoping as well.

Willow still looked worried, lips twisted in a grimace of concern. "But if Giles can be cloaked, we're talking powerful magicks here."

"Or god power."

"Which may be slightly worse."

"Can she help us?"

"Buffy? Yeah. But you two really need to get past this thing."

He nodded, taking small comfort in the fact that Buffy wasn't completely past this thing either.

Willow disappeared to brief Buffy and bring her back, and he went back out to brief the others on the pending arrivals. At least they'd worked with Willow before.

He was just about done when there was a knock on the outside door, and Willow came in, with Buffy right behind her, and he wondered which one of them felt more awkward at that moment. It was hard to tell.

She looked remarkably unchanged since the last time he saw her. Oh, her hair was cut a bit differently and slightly more blonde, but she could still pass for nineteen if she absolutely had to. She was wearing black jeans, a drapey gold shirt, and a camel colored long coat, none of which was particularly weather appropriate for Southern California. Angel just started introducing everyone, to avoid the continuation of the awkwardness.

"Should we identify abilities?" Bren asked, as soon as introductions were done. "I mean, we know you're a Slayer and she's a witch, but you don't know anything about us."

Buffy shrugged. "It might help."

"That's what I thought. I'm half Brachen demon, I have an eidetic memory, and I seem to be a Chosen of the Gorgons, although all that really seems to get me is they'll avenge my death. Oh, and the tattoos. Whee."

"Hon, that's kinda leaving stuff out," Kier interjected.

"Brachen demon?" Buffy repeated. "Which one are those again?"

"Peaceful demons generally," Willow reported cheerfully. "Kinda spikey and reptile-y, but not in a freaky way. But teal with red spikes, ugh, that so doesn't work. Anyways, it's why he has red eyes. Oh, and in Brachen mode, he's stronger than Human, and can take a beating."

Buffy took that in like she was used to Willow going off like this. By now, she ought to be. "Good to know." She then frowned and looked at Kier. "Did you just call him hon?"

Kier grinned at her. "We're butt buddies."

Rogue laughed at that, and Bren gave Kier a dirty look. "You always do this to me in front of company."

"What?" he claimed, laughing faintly. "I can't have a little fun shocking the hets?"

"Hey, Slayer here with a lesbian best friend," she replied. "Not that shockable. So are you demon too?"

"Vampire," Kier admitted. "But a good one. Good-ish. A bit of demon in me kept me from going completely ... what? Kill crazy? Anyways, apparently there was a cult of ex-Watchers who were hoping I'd be the male version of a Slayer or something like that. So we're probably distant cousins or something."

She looked at Angel askance. "Is this true?"

He was forced to shrug. "That's a heavily abbreviated version, but it'll do for now."

"Wow. The Watchers always turn out weirder than I thought." She looked at Rogue. "Demon?"

She shook her head. "Mutant. If I touch you I'll absorb your life force and abilities, possibly to death if I don't let go. Doesn't work on all demons."

To prove it, Kier touched her cheek. "Yeah, I'm dead, so no life force to steal."

That made her grimace. "So I guess I ain't too useful against vamps."

Buffy's brow furrowed as she seemed to be wracking her brain. "Mutants. Isn't there some mutant group or something?"

"The X-Men," Saddiq said, and when she looked at him, he said, "She's one of them, codenamed Rogue, and I'm one of them too, codenamed Saracen. I have skin as strong as metal, and have been trained in the most deadly martial arts."

"And you have an assload of pointy things," she replied, gesturing at the bandoleers of knives across his chest, and the swords on his back. "Holy crap, how do you get through airport security?"

Saddiq looked at her blankly. "I don't fly commercial."

"Sid was raised without humor," Kier added. "We're trying to teach him how to have some, but it's a long upward slog."

"Isn't his name Saddiq?"

"We call him Sid."

"We couldn't call him Sad," Rogue said.

"Wouldn't that be appropriate?" Saddiq countered.

Kier gave him a sympathetic look. "Probably, but we're trying not to hold it against you."

"Is this an awesomely freaky group or what?" Faith exclaimed, with a modicum of cheer. "It's like the weirdest weirdies in La-La Land have all sifted into Angel's office."

"Hey," Bren said.

"It's a compliment! I'm including myself in this, even though I'm not here all the time."

"Where's Xander?" Buffy wondered. "I thought he was here."

Hadn't Willow told her? Angel frowned, and told her, "He disappeared with Giles, Marc, and the rest."

"Who's Marc?"

"Oh, he's a trip B," Faith said, taking up the explanation. He flashed her a grateful look. "He's another mutant, Scorpion, 'cause he's all poisonous and whatever, but he's a mercenary, and he has enough weapons to take over his own South American country. If he doesn't have the weapon for it, it probably doesn't exist. Funny as hell too; he's like the opposite of Sid."

Buffy raised her eyebrows at this. "Well, that sounds ... interesting. So you have no idea where they are?"

"Only that if they could've contacted us, they would've by now," Bren said glumly.

She sighed. "Okay. Angel, Will said you know a god. That true?"

"Bob."

She gave him a disbelieving look. "A god named Bob?"

"That's what he calls himself here. We don't know his actual name."

"Although he's told us he's been known as Kama and Awha the Maori storm god, but we're just taking his word for it," Bren admitted. "He's currently in a Belial demon form, and you know how they love to lie."

"Kama fits, though," Kier added. This was met by general nods of agreement.

"Kama?" Buffy asked.

"As in the Kama Sutra?" Willow exclaimed, surprised. At the nods, she actually blushed slightly. "Oh wow."

"So he could ... I can't even think of a way to say this," Buffy said, scrubbing a hand through her hair. "So what can he do besides that, and why isn't he here?"

"He comes and goes of his own accord," Angel replied, and realizing what he'd just said, added, "No pun intended. Presumably he's working on a plan, but he doesn't always tell us what they are."

"As for powers, pretty much limitless," Bren said, taking up the thread again. He was a loyal assistant, no doubt about that. "He could shut a whole city down with one word."

"The real bitch of it is he took Logan with him," Faith said. "We wouldn't have to worry about being outnumbered if we had him here."

"Logan?"

"Wolverine of the X-Men," Saddiq reported. "Accelerated healing factor, adamantium skeleton and claws, heightened senses, extensive combat training."

"And an attitude that could curdle cream at five hundred yards," Bren added, not without a weary type of affection.

"Don't forget a body to die for," Kier said.

Faith grinned wickedly. "Oh hell yeah. That's his best feature."

"He has claws?" Buffy repeated, and then seemed to turn her thoughts inward for a moment before gasping, "Holy shit. I know him!"

"You do?" Angel asked, surprised.

"Yeah! I met this weird guy at Wesley's funeral, kind of a muscle-y, hairy lumberjack type, and it seemed weird that he was there. I mean, he hardly seemed like a guy that would be Wesley's friend, right? And then like a week later, I was scanning YouTube, and they had this clip of the X-Men fighting, and there he was. I couldn't believe it, except, you know, who would copy that hair? Also, no one has muttonchops nowadays except renfesters and sex predators. I couldn't believe it. So does that explain how Wesley knew a mutant claw guy?"

Angel nodded. "They were unlikely friends, but they were. Probably due to their backgrounds."

"What does that mean?" she wondered.

Angel suddenly realized that Buffy probably didn't know Wesley was an abused child, and she had no way of knowing Logan spent half his life being abused by other people. Was it even his right to tell her?

Rogue rescued him from having to decide. "Rough life, shit happens, we've all been there. Now I hate to be rude, but it's startin' to look a bit dusky outside. Shouldn't we get goin'?"

Buffy let out a heavy sigh, and Angel finally noticed the tension in her shoulders. Was it due to being around him, or the fight to come? "Yeah, I guess so. Do we have a plan?"

"Fight to the last man," Saddiq said.

Faith rolled her eyes. "He's not big on subtlety either."

"I was thinking we could head down to Crestwood Cemetery," Angel said, glad to be talking about something other than his missing friends. "It's the largest one closest to us, and if vampires and zombies are going to start rising up, that would be the nexus point."

She nodded. "Sounds like a start. Any idea on how many we could be facing?"

"If the zombies and ghouls and ghosts of earlier today were any indication, much more than we'd expect."

"So not helpful, Angel."

"I know. But until we're in the middle of it, we really don't know what to expect. Someone stole a book of the dead and is erasing the names. Since this has never happened before, we don't actually know what the outcome will be."

"Except loads of unhappy dead people," Willow said.

"How many names are in a book?" Buffy asked.

Angel exchanged looks with everyone else in the office, hoping he wouldn't have to be the one to tell her, but it seemed like they were all counting on him to do it. Damn it. "Millions, possibly billions."

"Billions? With a b?" At his nod, she looked utterly crestfallen. "Even if I brought in all the rest of the girls, there's just no way we can win."

"We can't let vampires overrun the Earth," Saddiq said, once again helpfully stating the obvious.

"All we got on our side is that all the names aren't being erased at once," Faith interjected, for once trying to look on the bright side. "I mean, if there were a million ghouls released on the city today, there'd be nothing left but concrete foundations."

As bright sides went, that seemed to be a bit on the dim side.

Willow was going to transport them en masse to the cemetery, but before that, Rogue asked Faith if she could "borrow" some of her abilities. Would it work that way with a Slayer? No one knew, but Faith was game for it (perhaps that's why she asked Faith as opposed to Buffy – Faith still gave off her bad girl air, like she was up for anything), and let Rogue grab her arm, just to see what would happen. Nothing visibly happened beyond the usual – veins stood out on Faith's arm, crawling up towards her shoulder, and Faith visibly weakened – but nothing much else. But once Rogue broke the connection, she claimed to feel stronger, and she had a look in her eye that he attributed more to battle high Faith than herself, so it was was easy to see that yes, some of it must have taken.

They had to wait directly until sundown, which gave Faith some time to recover (she was a Slayer, so it didn't take long), and then Willow brought them all there before disappearing to get some of the other Slayers they had standing by.

Crestwood was large, but not one of the better cemeteries. The area they were in, beneath the denuded skeleton of a sickly spreading oak, had gravestones listing like rotten teeth in the soft earth, and the gentle slope beneath them seemed more like the ground settling than anything that had naturally occurred. It was probably best not to think about how it became this way.

The sky wasn't perfectly dark, it was a sort of rusty smog induced color, with enough light at the fringes to make Angel feel like his skin was itching on the inside, but it was annoying, nothing close to life threatening.

"This is nice and creepy," Rogue noted, looking around.

Buffy shrugged. "I've been in creepier."

"There was this one cemetery in Bucharest in 1902 that was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," Angel said. "Of course, that was before World War One, and oh god, the trenches were even worse -"

"Don't tell me!" Bren exclaimed hastily. In anticipation of the fight, he'd let his Brachen side out. "You know I remember everything, and I don't wanna remember that, thank you."

"Sorry."

"Oh, so that's what eidetic means," Buffy muttered.

"Yeah, I didn't know that either," Faith commiserated.

Willow returned with five other Slayers, none of whom Angel recognized, although Buffy hastily introduced them as Jade (brunette), Keely (blonde), Gisela (Spanish), Lawan (Thai), and Carys (mixed race, but spoke with such a heavy Welsh accent it was sort of hard to understand her). They all glared at him, Kier, and Bren like they wanted to stake them all, but Buffy pointed out they were good vamps (and demon) and not to be hurt. They listened to her, but kept their distance from them. Sid offered knives to anyone who wanted one, but every Slayer had her own stake (Buffy had an extra she gave to Rogue). Still, Faith took one. They formed a very loose circle that spread out across the cemetery, although stayed within each other's line of sight.

Angel smelled them first.

It was death, of course, but that odd dry scent of death that was typical of vampires. The sun was just a faint glow at the base of the horizon – the itch beneath his skin had faded to almost nothing – but here they came, smelling like tanned skin and grave dirt. He tried to get a direction, but couldn't.

"You getting this?" Kier asked.

Angel nodded. "Can't get a fix. You know where they're coming from?"

"Vamps?" Faith asked.

"You know why you're not getting a fix?" Bren asked, and he sounded nervous.

Looking around with his heightened night vision, Angel could see why his directional sense wasn't working.

They were everywhere.

It seemed impossible to go from nothing to everything in the space of seconds, but they weren't your typical vampires either. They weren't truly sired, or if they had been, they'd been dusted long ago and shouldn't have been able to come back. But now that death had rejected them, they had to come back in some form, and anyone touched by the supernatural was as liable to come back a vampire as a zombie (or a ghoul). It didn't make a lot of sense, but none of this did. Somebody was rewriting the rules of death, and these poor bastards couldn't rest in peace. The smooth but uneven ground had gaping holes in it, where the newly undead had dug themselves out. Like they all thought, they started coming towards them, the only living things in the place.

"What's the strategy here?" Sid asked, as he pulled out his swords.

"Kill 'em all, and let Bob sort them out," Faith replied.

Yeah, that sounded as good a plan as any.

Angel had repaired his damaged staking rig, the ones he wore under the sleeves of his coat, but in this chaotic scrum it was nearly impossible to stake two at once. The vampires seemed content to ignore him (and Kier) and go for the living, but they made them pay attention by dusting them. It soon became apparent to Angel they were all being driven by a hyperactive feeding instinct, and he hoped they were all headed towards them and not out into the city, otherwise it would be a hideous bloodbath. Perhaps sensing the danger, Willow cast a spell that circled the cemetery with a ring of fire, and yet, just to prove how instinct was overriding any kind of sense, several vampires and zombies just walked right through the wall of flame, going up like Roman candles. You'd think bone stupid vampires would be a good thing, but not really – this only proved they had no limits, couldn't be scared off by anything. They'd just go until they couldn't go anymore.

They staked dozens, Rogue proving she did indeed have some Slayer moves, Sid showing off how ruthless he'd become while off with Marc by beheading several vampires at once, his swords whirling through the air like flying sawblades, and yet there was no cease in the inhuman tide. Angel slammed a stake through one vamp's chest and just twisted off a zombie's head like a bottle cap (it was a supremely rotted zombie – he had no idea how it was even standing up with mushy femurs), pausing briefly to look down at the sloping expanse of the cemetery. In the flickering shadows of the flames, he saw dozens upon dozens of bodies converging on them, much more than had been on the street that afternoon. There couldn't have been this many buried in the cemetery, so where were they all coming from?

The shrieks of the dusted was an almost constant noise now, he could taste their ashes on the wind, vampires were dying at about a dozen a second, and they weren't making any dent in the undead tide swelling towards them.

He wondered if he should warn the others that they were doomed, or if dying in ignorance really was bliss.


	12. Chapter 12

12

Fighting side by side, Angel allowed himself to feel a moment of nostalgia. This could have been ten years ago in Sunnydale, with Buffy and him staking vampires in a graveyard. Then Bren yelped as he was taken down by a zombie, and Kier shouted, "Get your hands offa him, bitch," and he was back in the now.

Buffy gave him a sidelong glance, and said, "I can't believe your group is weirder than mine."

"I live in L.A. - weird is normal."

She had no choice but to shrug – could she contradict that? - and then Keely went down in a scrum of vampire bodies with a shriek, and they attempted to fight their way towards her, which was harder than it should have been. A couple of vampires exploded into dust before them, and voices said, "Started -"

"- the -"

"- party without -"

"- us?"

Angel had never been so happy to see the shiny, empty eyes of the Sisters before in his life. (Well, maybe that one time in Prague, but he'd been Angelus then.) "Save the Slayer," he said, pointing at the heap where Keely was.

Buffy stared at him. "More friends of yours?"

"Not exactly, but they're on our side. Don't kill them!" That was an order for the standing Slayers, and an order for the Sisters. He didn't know if any of them women would actually heed it.

He heard the shrieks of vampires exploding into dust, and saw a flash of silver before the head fell off one and it exploded as well. Faith said, before Angel could, "Well it's about damn time you showed up."

Logan shrugged and decapitated a zombie, all at the same time. "Got delayed." He smelled of blood. That was typical of Logan, but he didn't look like he'd ever been hurt (his shirt wasn't torn, and he was lucky to make it through a fight with an intact shirt), and for some reason it game him a bad feeling. Why?

Did he also smell of smoke? Weird.

"Routine twelve," Faith said, and Logan, after dusting another vampire, bent over quickly as if reaching for something on the ground, and Faith launched herself towards him in a run. She jumped on his back and then off, launching herself high over the crowd of vampires, raising her stake and coming down hard, landing on the head of one and driving him down as she put the stake through the chest of another. Logan, meanwhile, had already straightened up and taken care of a vampire and a zombie.

"They've fought before," Buffy noted, surprised.

"They've done more than that," Angel said, and almost instantly regretted opening his mouth.

She gave him a surprised glance, looking between them before exclaiming, "Damn. I knew Faith had a thing for older guys, but wow." After a moment, she added, "He does have a great ass, though."

"Hey, fighting here."

Suddenly a very familiar voice started singing, "It's midnight at the drowning pool, and I'm glad that you're here -" Bob appeared near the edge of the ring of fire, and instinctively all the vampires and zombies moved away like they didn't for the fire. "Angel, Kier, Sisters, this doesn't apply to you. But let there be sunlight!"

Nothing actually happened, except all the vampires cringed and burst into flames, as if they really had been caught in the open during high noon. Until this moment, Angel had no idea Bob could kill vampires by simply making them believe something. But a god's voice compelled beyond reason.

Buffy jumped back with a "Whoa!" as her stake almost caught fire. "How the hell did he do that?" Now that the crowd had thinned out enough to see him, she said, "Holy shit, he's gorgeous. You didn't mention that."

"He's a sex god," Willow pointed out, materializing beside her. "He wouldn't be ugly."

Fair point.

Bob was grinning like he'd heard the compliment – and in all likelihood, he had. "Hey zombies," he said, holding out his hand before making a fist and pulling it back towards him, like he'd grabbed a moth in mid air. "Got your brains."

All the zombies stopped dead (no pun intended) and keeled over, dead for good this time. Buffy looked at it all in wide eyed surprised. "Wow. Why do you even bother fighting if you got this guy?"

"He's not always here," Logan grumbled, and his voice had a surprisingly cold aspect to it. Did he and Bob have another falling out? He couldn't imagine how hard it was to be Bob's avatar and all the bullshit that entailed, but he'd never heard Logan sound so coldly towards him. It was like he was the Organization or something. Angel tried to catch his eye, but he looked away.

"I'm a busy man," Bob admitted cheerfully, then added, "Okay, technically I'm not a man. But you know what I mean."

"Not a man?" Buffy repeated, looking him over. Her eyes were clearly saying _"Yes you are"_.

"Gods don't really have genders. We're both and neither."

"Huh?"

"Exactly." He gave her his best shit eating grin, and then added, "Heya Will, how's the magic?"

"Good," she replied, almost relieved. "Except ... I can't find Giles. Think you can?"

Now Bob frowned. "What d'ya mean?"

"He disappeared, along with Marcus and Xander and everybody else who went out onto the street, save for Angel, who was in the sewer, and Sid, who was buried under a pile of bad guys. I tried a locator spell, but nothing turned up."

Bob looked genuinely concerned, and it was then that Angel noticed Bob's t-shirt. It said, in thick block letters, 'Play along'. It said that for perhaps a second before reverting back to 'Walk behind me - we'll start a parade!' What the hell was that? Did anyone else see it? He looked around, but couldn't tell.

The Sisters suddenly stood in front of Bob, and said, "We're -"

"- sorry -"

"- Bob."

"Sorry about what?"

Logan suddenly lunged towards Bob's back, and just as Angel's mind conjured the unbelievable thought, Logan's claws sliced right through Bob's neck, decapitating him. "That," the Sisters said in unison, stepping back to make room for his falling body.

Almost everyone was too shocked to do anything, it was totally fucking unbelievable, but Sid, as always, was on the move, sword raised as he charged towards Logan. It was the Sisters who intervened before he could meet almost certain death at Logan's claws, one grabbing his arm while the other drop kicked him in the chest, sending him flying backwards.

"Kid, it had to be done," Logan said, and as he looked at them, his eyes filled with blue light. Oh no.

"What the fuck?!" Faith exclaimed angrily. "Why the hell did you -"

He held up a hand, and Faith fell silent, although judging from her pissed off expression, not of her own accord. Angel realized he couldn't move, and from the alarmed look Buffy was giving him, she couldn't either. No one could. Willow was opening her mouth and closing it, trying to speak but unable to. Logan's first act with Bob's power was to shut them down. But what did the Sisters have to do with this? They were helping him, and it didn't seem forced.

"Sorry," Logan said, and it was his voice, but laced with power, almost thrumming with it, making an itchy feeling appear beneath all their skins. He was now limned with blue light, and he started to hover oh so slightly off the ground, the blue enveloping him like a shroud. "But I had to do it. This is over."

And only when everything whited out did Angel realize he meant the entire world.

****

So, woods. How did you wake up from almost certain death and find yourself in the woods?

The thing is, Xander was so accustomed to weird shit, this didn't bother him, and the fact that it didn't bother him bothered him. Figure that one out.

He still had the gun Marc gave him, and with a lack of anything better to do, he counted the remaining bullets. Fifteen. Which was good to know in case he ran into something that could be shot, but failing that, he could shoot himself fifteen times, and wasn't that a comfort. He thought that might actually be a more likely scenario.

Very briefly in his life, he was a Boy Scout. He lasted, what, one day? He honestly couldn't see wearing a kerchief ever in his life, and short pants? What were they, Brownies? Actually, he had a sneaking suspicion that Brownies got to do the fun stuff, so he walked out. He never did join the Brownies, but he'd never figured out how to anyways. He felt that maybe if he stuck around, maybe he'd know how to navigate the woods, figure out where he was.

What he did have was the Discovery Channel, though, and he knew moss grew on the North sides of trees (right? Maybe that was it ..). So he started looking around the tree trunks for moss. By the twelfth tree he gave up. No moss anywhere. "Well, fuck this," Xander said aloud, and just headed off in a random direction.

For woods, they were very well lit and clean. Almost amazingly so, as if Humans had never been here. He'd walked for maybe two hundred yards before he stopped dead, and exclaimed to no one, "Oh, fuck me. I'm dead, aren't I? I'm dead and this is hell."

"It'd be my hell, not yours," Helga grumbled, emerging from the woods on the opposite side. "Unless you hate forests too."

"Hel!" He'd never been so happy to see a green skinned woman in his life. Well, maybe that one that slept with Captain Kirk, but she was just wearing body paint and it wasn't the same. "Wow, does that mean we've all been teleported to Middle Earth?"

"I dunno, you're the first person I've found." She scowled, and looked up at the sky. Xander followed, seeing slices of blue between the thick interlaced canopy of tree branches. "Can't find my flamethrower. Somebody's gonna pay for that."

"I have my gun," he offered, although a flamethrower would have been more effective on underbrush. "Say, what are we looking for?"

"The sun. You see it?"

"Umm, no. But we probably can't see it from here," he admitted, attempting to look through the branches. He never knew where to look for the sun in the sky, but he wasn't about to admit it.

Helga grunted non-noncommittally, her tail twitching with impatience, then said, "I don't think there's a sun."

Xander scoffed, assuming she was joking, but after a moment he realized she wasn't. "Are you serious? Of course there's a sun! Look how bright it is."

"The sky's lit up like there should be a sun, but there isn't one."

He shook his head vehemently, although he wasn't sure why. Was that any weirder than anything else he'd ever encountered? "That's not even possible."

"Yeah, it is. It means we're in a god realm."

"What?" Suddenly he felt his stomach twist and knot, and he realized he probably needed to see a doctor about his acid reflux problem. Constant jolts of fear and anxiety played hell on a system. "Who ... Yama?"

She shrugged, looking around the forest as if it might morph into something more lethal. It hadn't ... yet. "Could be, but if it was, why aren't we dead yet?" Before Xander could even venture a guess – oh, he hated guesses like this – she scowled at her own question, and started walking off into the trees. "Unless he's keeping us for some other reason."

"What other reason?" he asked, quickly scrambling to follow her. Did he even want to know the answer to that question?

He didn't know where she thought she was going either, but he felt that didn't matter so much. At least if he was going to die, he wasn't going to die alone.


	13. Chapter 13

13

Angel heard birds singing like they were perched on his head. Of course they weren't, but damn, did they have to be so loud?

It was another day in Los Angeles – bright, sunny, the smog at tolerable levels for the moment – and Angel did all the usual things: showered, shaved, made coffee, wondered why he felt so funny. Something was wrong, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what.

Hmm. Maybe that was a common problem when you were an occult detective. It wasn't like there was a support group he could ask.

He cringed at the bright sunlight, a holdover from his vampire days. You'd think he'd be used to it by now, it wasn't like he gave it up yesterday, but after a couple hundred years of avoiding sunlight, it had become a knee jerk response. It'd probably take a couple of decades to unlearn the reflex.

Traffic was typical – awful – and even though he left early, he was almost late. And coming into his own office, how embarrassing. "Geeze, boss man, we didn't know if you were gonna bother to show up today," Bren announced, looking up from his computer.

"If you're hung over, I got a great cure," Doyle said, standing by the coffee maker and sipping from a mug. He actually did look a bit hung over, but that wasn't unusual.

"Thanks, but it was just traffic. Got a remedy for that?"

He thought about it a moment. "Maybe. I know a guy who knows a guy that supposedly can eat metal. The only problem is I don't think he likes fiberglass."

"Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. What's on the agenda for today?"

"We're headed down to Resida this afternoon to check out a haunted house – a real one, bleeding walls and everything, sounds cool – and then we have a client, Tim Callahan, coming in later who says the new people that moved into his rental home are vampires. Since we're gonna be down in Resida, you want to do the interview on that, Doyle?"

He looked at Bren in surprise before looking back at Angel. "He gets to assign stuff now?"

"Who's the Gorgon's Chosen?" Bren replied, with a sarcastic archness.

Since they were both half Brachen demon, they liked to get into these fake pissing contests, like they were in a war for office supremacy. It was generally amusing until it got annoying, then it was a pain in the ass. But overall it was good, as Doyle had taken to treating Bren like a little brother he watched out for, although oftentimes it was Bren looking out for Doyle.

"Unless you want to come with us to blood house," Wesley said, coming into the lobby from his office, holding a book. "I'm sure Brendan could stay here and do the interview."

Doyle thought that over with a scowl. "Well, I guess I could stay here ..."

Bren grinned. "You don't wanna visit the last house on the left? I'm truly shocked."

Doyle gave him the V salute, an offensive gesture in every European country (why it had never meant the same thing in America he had no idea), but Bren had been around long enough to know what it meant, and all he did was smile and blow him a kiss.

Angel had just poured himself a cup of coffee, wondering what was bothering him about all of this, when the office door opened and a familiar voice crowed, "Hey party people, what's shaking?" It was Kier, Bren's actor boyfriend, looking tanned, sculpted, and otherwise fabulous in tight jeans, a red muscle shirt that showed off both his tan and his well toned arms, and sunglasses that hid his arctic blue eyes until he lifted them up to his lightened hair. He leaned over the desk and gave Bren a quick kiss as Doyle said sarcastically, "Get a room."

"We're going to a bleeding house," Bren told Kier excitedly.

"Cool."

"How's Cordy?" Angel wondered.

Cordelia was actually responsible for Kier and Bren knowing each other. Kier landed a part on the soap opera Cordy was currently working on, and at a party she casually introduced them, although she confided to Angel later on she wanted them to hook up as she thought they were perfect for each other, but she knew Bren balked at blind dates since his last disastrous one (when he almost got sacrificed by that Shoggoth demon). Cordy proved to be a good judge of character, because even though Kier was a bit of a flake, Bren was deliriously happy with him, and had just moved into his West Hollywood apartment. Angel had helped him move, and Bren still owed him for that.

"She's cool," Kier reported, apparently unaware he had just used the word "cool" twice in a mere three words. "She's got this big story arc coming up, so I've been runnin' lines with her. Not that I'm in the scenes, of course; my job is just to be the half naked hot, stupid guy."

"Which is precisely what I love about you," Bren said. Kier gave him a playful slap on the shoulder for that.

This was all very sweet. So why did it feel wrong?

He wandered off to his office, followed by Wesley, who was saying, "I'm thinking we're dealing with a Fortharai demon in Resida."

"Not a poltergeist?"

"Poltergeists really don't do blood, no matter what horror movies say. Violence, yes, but manifestations of blood? Not their style. But I believe the Fortharai may be doing this because the home is built on one of their burial grounds."

Angel considered this as he sat behind his heavy, high polished wooden desk. It was a real beauty, and he was inordinately proud of it. "Not an Indian burial ground sort of deal, is it?"

"No. The Fortharai eat their dead. So my guess is they want the occupants to leave so they can tear up the grounds and have a feast."

"Lovely. I don't suppose we can tell them to take their show on the road?"

"We could, but I suggest we bring machetes as back up."

"Good idea."

Wesley turned to go, but then he paused and pulled out a envelope from the back of his book. "Right, I almost forgot. This was under the door when I came in this morning. It doesn't smell like blood, isn't ticking, and doesn't appear to have any magic on it, so I assume it's safe."

He put it on the desk. It had simply "Angel" on it in a plain black font, and felt so light it could have been empty. He grimace at it, and said, "Thanks. It's good to see you, Wesley."

Wesley glanced back at him from the doorway, brow furrowing in consternation. "What do you mean? I'm here every day."

"Yeah. I ... um, I'm having a really weird day today. Ignore me."

"Shouldn't have gone out drinking with Doyle."

"Oh hell, I left him and Rags at midnight. You need demon kidneys to keep up with those two." Those two could empty a bar between them. How they did it and didn't die of alcohol poisoning was positively supernatural.

Wesley was gone by the time he opened the envelope, and a single slip of paper fell out. He felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of anxiety as he picked it up and read the short message typed on the paper. It read simply: _Play along_.

What? What the hell kind of message was that? Play along with what?

He figured it for an obscure prank and had wadded the piece of paper into a ball when he suddenly remembered someone wearing a shirt with _Play Along_ written on it. An almost ethereally handsome man with electric blue eyes ...

... and then he remembered everything.

It was like a lightning bolt hit him straight in the cortex; his brain felt like it was going to explode with all the information - contradictory, overstuffed, wrong – that suddenly flooded in. He grabbed his skull to keep it from rupturing, and flung himself back so violently he almost fell out of his chair, only the wall keeping him upright. His blood pounded in his ears, and the pain was beyond description, until the electric sizzle of it seemed to die as quickly as it began.

And yet, his head still hurt, throbbing and buzzing with everything that was wrong, with one life laid over another.

Holy shit – no wonder he kept thinking something was wrong. _Everything_ was wrong. Wes, Cordy, Doyle, Kier, they were all supposed to be dead. (Okay, Kier was supposed to be a vampire, but that was just dead with an asterisk beside it.) He himself wasn't supposed to be a Human, he was supposed to still be a vampire. And Bob -

- who was Bob?

Now he remembered. The man with the violent blue eyes, the fallen god – he was supposed to be running that demon bar downtown, The Way Station, only Helga was running it, the hitwoman Stansin demon who was an unlikely friend of Rags'. Bob ... Bob was never here. In this reality, he didn't exist. How could that be? Gods transcended reality, so -

Logan. Shit, Logan was his avatar; Logan had his powers.

Now his head really started to hurt. Logan was a mutant, a reality warper of a high order ... but that wasn't true. He was a mutant, yes, but that was a god power, not a mutant power. He was friends with Xavier and those mutants who ran that school up in New York (Bren had been there originally), but he wasn't supposed to be there as a sponsor. Logan had been a teacher there once, he had been in the X-Men, he ... he was Wolverine. He was – he used to be, he was supposed to be – an ex-assassin, a man with metal claws, extensive combat knowledge, and a healing factor that put vampires to shame. He was supposed to be Wolverine, a name that caused a crackling fear in the mutant underground, except Wolverine had never existed here. There wasn't a mutant underground either, as mutants were an accepted group in society. There wasn't, to his knowledge, an Organization either.

Logan had rewritten his entire reality. He was a powerful but relatively benign recluse living in Tokyo with his wife. But how had Logan kept Bob's powers for so long? Gods could only die under certain circumstances. He should have regenerated and reappeared long before now ...

Except he remembered Logan killing Bob's body, and apologizing for it. He'd done a deal to keep Bob's power in him, to keep Bob in a limbo state. Who would be powerful enough to do that? And why would Logan do that in the first place? Betrayal wasn't in his nature, and he'd had Bob's powers before, but resisted the temptation to use them to his own ends. Why now? Why had he had taken a gamble with god powers? Those always came back to bite you on the ass.

Oh no. Yama. Logan had done a deal with Yama.

Angel slumped over his desk, head still in his hands, wondering what he should do. Yes, this was a good life – a great life; all his dead friends weren't dead anymore – but it was wrong, it was a false reality. And while he was always skeptical of Bob and his true intentions, his non-existence could only bring trouble. How many lives had been irrevocably altered or even denied because Logan had wiped the slate? How many people were still alive who honestly shouldn't be? He was probably damaging the very fabric of reality itself, but that kind of damage was hard to gauge until it was so bad almost nothing could be done about it.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was what could Yama possibly get from this deal? He would be getting something – no death god did you favors for free, and the lack of Bob couldn't have been enough. Something must have been in this for him.

The most ironic part was he didn't care much about the prospect of facing off with a death god. But facing off with Logan? How the hell was he going to do that?


	14. Chapter 14

14

Logan lived outside Tokyo, in an area that wasn't so much rural as primeval – it was like time travel. The forest was green and unspoiled, like Humans had never been here. The only signs of trespass were the roads and an occasional sign. Angel followed them to a large but still humble house that existed in a clearing amongst the trees, which continued sprawling out beyond the grounds. If he thought the birds were bad in Los Angeles, he had no idea – it sounded like he was in an aviary now.

He had just passed through the wrought iron gates and was on his way up the crushed gravel path towards the house when Logan stepped out from beneath the shade of a blossoming cherry tree. "You usually call first." Now that Angel remembered his past life – er, no, the correct timeline – he remembered Logan used to have pretty prominent sideburns, and his hair was a little more rigid in shape. Now he was clean shaven and his hair was a bit softer around the edges, and his eyes seemed to have lost much of the intensity and wariness, as did his posture and the way he carried himself – he was no longer ready to fight at a milliseconds' notice, no longer haunted or hunted. He was a very handsome man, which was sort of a shame really.

Angel sighed, not sure how to start or what to say. So he just threw himself on the grenade. "I know, Logan. I know about Bob."

Logan didn't look surprised, but he did look mildly disappointed. "The Powers, right? I thought they might get upset with me at some point."

His blase reaction was so stunning he scoffed, although it was really only to keep from shouting at him. "You don't care about what you've done?"

"Made everyone's life better? Made the world better? No."

Okay, he'd fallen asleep and woken up in bizarro world. "You killed Bob, and you made a deal with Yama. What's he getting out of this?"

"The satisfaction of keeping Bob in limbo."

"Bullshit. No god comes that cheap."

"You're underestimating how much he hates him."

"And you're trusting a death god who started erasing the names from a book of the dead. Logan, you're smarter than that. None of this is like you. I think you're under the influence of something."

He smirked sourly at that. "Like me? Like the violent, doomed, miserable man I was? Like you were? I wised up. I was tired of being a pawn in a game I didn't create and didn't want to play. We thought Bob was better than the rest of them, but he wasn't. He was a god, and we are nothing to them."

"You killed him."

"I put him in limbo. You know he'll be back."

Angel just stared at him, shaking his head in disbelief. "We have to reverse this, Logan, we have to fix things. This is wrong."

"It's a hell of a lot better, isn't it? Do you miss being a vampire?"

"It's a lie!"

"Which would you rather have – a beautiful lie or the ugly truth?"

He hadn't really expected this, but why hadn't he? If Logan had gone this far, did he expect him to just come to his senses and fold? He'd lived as a god for so many years – or had it been years? He honestly had no idea – it probably wasn't something he was going to give up. The Logan he thought he knew, then and now, didn't exist anymore. Maybe he'd never really existed in this reality. But when he came down to it, could he blame him? Logan had to be one of the most fucked over guys on planet Earth, screwed up and over by almost everyone who crossed his path. If he wanted to rewrite his own history ... who was going to blame him? "It's wrong. These wrong timestreams have a way of collapsing in on themselves."

"Don't be so sure. Bob could play with time in ways neither you or I could imagine. Aren't you happy? You're Human now, Cordy's alive, Doyle, Wesley, Gunn, Keir. Even Cressida's alive out there somewhere. All our friends who died and didn't have to are getting a chance to live their lives. Do you really want to take that away from them?"

He just knew he was going to throw that at him, and he had no real response. Of course he was glad they were alive; their deaths were so horribly wrong. But he had thought of something – someone – he had no recollection of seeing or knowing. "What about Saddiq?"

Finally, a genuine reaction: Logan winced. "I couldn't save everybody."

"All the Eden kids. They don't exist."

"The program never existed. It was an abomination."

"Saddiq wasn't. None of those kids were."

"It couldn't be helped. I wasn't going to let them design kids as weapons. I saved who I could, Angel. I'm not perfect, I'm not even sure how much of these powers I've mastered. Maybe I can do something retroactively, fix something - "

"No! You need to stop. We need to figure out a way to get Bob back, or at least do an end run around Yama. Wesley thinks that - "

"Wesley?" he interrupted. "You told Wesley? He's not with you, is he?" But the way Logan was staring at him, the way he felt something twist in his mind, he knew Logan wasn't really asking, he was seeing for himself.

"You could ask, you know, not just mind fuck me."

"Sorry. Habit. You've had magic used on you recently."

"Yeah. Did you forget I'm still hunting demons in Los Angeles? And by the way, why the hell did you do that to me? You made me a Human, why not give me a peaceful life?" Okay, so now he was trying to distract him, but he couldn't have him see everything in his brain.

"You want to atone. I'm letting you."

"Then why change me to a Human? Wasn't that what I was working towards?"

"Do you really want me to change you back to a vampire?"

"You're missing the point!"

"And you're hiding something from me. No matter. Once you forget, you'll tell me."

Logan's eyes started to glow blue, and Angel's worst fear was confirmed: there was no reasoning with him. He was gone. "Logan, don't -"

And then he completely forgot what he was saying.

* * *

Wow. When Angel told them all of this, he didn't believe him. Logan, some kind of god killer/god avatar? Well, killer he might believe, but avatar was a weird thought. Still, he was a Chosen of the Gorgons, and how inexplicable was that?

Brendan stepped out on the gravel path, and Logan reacted in genuine surprise. He probably wasn't used to people sneaking up on him. "How did you -"

Bren held out the pendant hanging around his neck, and didn't bother to gesture to the bloody symbol drawn on his chest, just visible through the open neck of his shirt. It looked like three parallel lines branching out from one – Kier thought it looked like a tree branch – but it was, according to Wesley, a very sacred symbol, and in his blood brought the protection of the Gorgons right to him. It hurt a bit, but he'd had worse. "I've invoked the protection of the Gorgons. No other gods can have power over me, including, it seems, you." He sighed wearily. "Jesus, Logan, of all people. I looked up to you."

He looked at Angel, who seemed confused. "Huh? Bren, what's going on?"

"Go home," Logan said, and with a dismissive wave of his hand, Angel popped out of existence. Bren kept a good distance away from Logan, although he wasn't sure why – he was assured that no god powers could be used upon him while he was invoking direct protection. "I was wondering what he was hiding. It was you. It was Wesley's idea, wasn't it?"

"He said the best way to fight a god was using another god."

He chuckled, but it didn't seem nearly as warm as it should have. "That's true. Good old Wes. If he doesn't have the answer, he has a book that does."

"You have to stop. Okay? I don't know who Bob is, I don't know who Saddiq is, but if you've changed the timeline, it's wrong."

"You've been told that it's wrong."

"Don't. Don't do this."

"Kier would be dead, you know. Do you know what happens to him? He's made a vampire in a snuff film. He works as a bite club whore, catering to Humans who get their kink from being bitten by vamps. He is initially sent to seduce you and work his way into the good graces of Angel Investigations as a mole. I'll admit, he seems smarter and less shallow in his vampire incarnation, but being murdered is going to make you wiser. Ask me, I know."

He was trying hard not to listen to him, but tears were clouding his eyes, and his resolve was weakening. Oh god, Kier was a vampire? And Wesley was dead, and Cordy, and Cressida, and Gunn ... no, they told him he might hear some awful things, but they had to save Logan from himself, and the world from Yama. He had to keep focused on the true end game. He shook his head and tried to blink the tears from his eyes. "What about Yama, Logan? I've read about him, he's -"

"Not the point. They were trying to trick you into doing this. They know with your Gorgon protection you're the only one who can really stand up to me, so they told you what they wanted you to hear."

"They wouldn't do that." Would they?

"Do you know who else is dead? Scott, Xavier, Jean ... Matthew, your ex-boyfriend."

It felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He was gasping for breath. "Wh-what? All of them?"

"So many bad things happened in that world. This is paradise compared to it."

If that was true, it was. It was a world of death. So what if Logan did a deal with a death god to prevent it? But then he remember what he saw of Yama lore online, and almost shuddered. Even if only half of that stuff was true, it was too horrifying to contemplate. He shook his head firmly, grabbing on to his stone pendant like a lifeline. It was the size of a large pebble and a strange opalescent grey, like a special kind of granite. But Rags had told him it was actually a drop of Gorgon blood, and yet he was so drunk when he told him this he had no idea if he should believe him. Sometimes he wondered if it was just radioactive waste, because it was always weirdly warm. "Maybe so, but you can't deal with a death god. Or even just a god! Have the past few years taught you nothing? These fuckers screw us over first chance they get!"

He smirked in an incredibly unpleasant way, a way that Logan had never done. "Like the Gorgons have screwed over you?"

"That's not the same."

"No? Have you ever even seen them? Did you ask to be their chosen? What do you get out of it? Just some markings that guarantee you will be hunted down by other demons and feared by others. Sounds like you've been screwed over to me."

He couldn't help it, he sneered. This was a side of Logan he'd never seen – smug, arrogant, self-satisfied. Still hot in his loose black linen pants and tight white tank top, but all that made him was a great looking prick. "I'm not leaving until we solve this, Logan. By the way, Angel asked me to ask you something in case you made him forget before he could bring it up. Where's Marc? And Xander, and Matt, and Giles. He also said the Helga we know isn't the real Helga, whatever that means. So where is she?"

Finally a crack in his arrogant mask. He grimaced in embarrassment. "I haven't mastered inter-dimensional travel. I think they're in another dimension, but I can't find them. I will."

"Haven't you figured it out? Yama must have them. Why I don't know, but he's obviously a vicious asshat, so we h -"

Bren felt a sharp, incredible pain in his back and chest, and he looked down to see a fist dripping blood sticking right out of the center of his sternum. He was wondering where that had come from and looked to see that Logan was staring at him in wide eyed horror.

Well, at least he could die knowing Logan hadn't killed him. But who had?

Now that was gonna bug him.

* * *

He was a god, he should have seen this coming. Why hadn't he?

Logan heard/felt an enormous electric hum in his head, and it seemed like he was suddenly blind and deaf. He wasn't, but everything his powers let him take for granted – being able to see everything down to the molecule, being able to hear thoughts and feel other peoples' (and things) feelings like they were just a breeze brushing past him – disappeared. It was almost instantaneous with the moment the man appeared behind Brendan and put his fist through his chest.

As he withdrew his fist from Brendan, he fell in a messy heap to the ground, and Logan could get a good look at the intruder. He was almost seven feet tall, sun bronzed (?) and muscular enough to make a gym bunny jealous, all emphasized by the fact that he was shirtless and only wearing jeans, his broad, muscular torso a mocking impossibility of statue like perfection. He was bald, with a perfectly dome shaped skull, and his eyes were perfectly black – no whites, no irises, no corneas - just liquid ink with lightning like pulses of thin, electrical gold veins in them. His smile was all alabaster white teeth, and was just as evil as a scowl.

"Yama," Logan said, wondering where the hell his powers went.

"My ears were burning," he said, his voice like a gong given speech. It made his eardrums hurt.

"You didn't have to kill him!"

"I kill anyone I want. Death god, remember? I take who I want when I want. And while it's been fun, Logan ... I'm kinda bored."

Here it was. He wasn't an idiot, he knew Yama would probably try and betray him someday, but he'd been trying to concoct a contingency plan. The problem was, almost none of Bob's god friends would talk to him, and no one who would wanted to go against a death god of Yama's stature. "Was he right? Do you have them?"

Yama arched a single bronze eyebrow at him. "Have who? Living Humans are really starting to annoy the shit out of me. If I had them, they'd be dead. Much like this world will be, in five minutes. I'm gonna have so much fun keeping you as my bitch."

"That wasn't the deal."

"It's the deal now," Yama said, and in the space of a blink Yama was right in front of him, and drove his fist straight through his chest with a wet, tearing sound. Logan thought he could actually feel his hand close around his heart. He grinned down at him, his eyes storm clouds, and reminded him, "Can't heal from a death god, meatbag."

The worst part was, in spite of the wonderful life he'd had these last couple of years, an actual permanent death remained a great relief.


	15. Chapter 15

15

It was almost too easy.

Bob had been such a degenerate, it was hard to believe he'd ever become as powerful as he had. That just proved how devious he was, he supposed. He never should have gotten his powers back in the first place.

He sensed an alternate energy and glanced over into the trees in time to see a snake drop down from a tree branch. "Oh Degei, I was wondering when you would show up. You're too late, but I'm sure you know that."

Maybe Bob's penchant for lame ass obscure gods had helped keep him afloat. They liked any attention, even if it came from a fallen, one who could eclipse them all if he ever regained all his powers (although the chances of the Powers allowing that to stand was nil). Degei was a fellow death god, so maybe he should be more respectful, but the guy was truly pathetic. A snake god? Like anyone in this sad excuse for a culture would worship one of those little pests. As for power levels, they were a stalemate. Death plus death equaled death – neither could best the other, so a fight between them would be an exercise in futility.

He saw snakes streaming up from the lawn, down from the branches of trees, and he knew what was going on: Degei was going to manifest. But why? It then occurred to him, and he smiled. "You want in on the party, huh? Sorry, I'm throwing it, so I get first taste. But there's enough death to go around."

Suddenly a man's voice started singing, "I like how you pretend that the end will be the end, so fill your thirst -"

He followed the sound to Logan, now sitting up as the hole in his body healed up with a slightly pulsing blue light emanating from his chest. He looked at him with cobalt blue eyes and grinned, but it wasn't his smile. " - and drink a curse, to the death of death instead."

Yama held out his hand to repel Bob, to throw him back into the void, but he felt ... resistance? No, he couldn't feel resistance! Who the hell was blocking him? Not Bob – he wasn't strong enough. Not Degei, because he knew death energy when he felt it. What the hell was this? "You couldn't have gotten out. How the fuck did you get out?"

Bob, now fully inhabiting Logan's body, popped up to his feet, like the Human shell hadn't just been killed a minute before. "What you should be asking yourself is how you, a god of some note, let a Human fool you. Not that you should really feel bad about it. Logan is a child of chaos, isn't he? There's no telling how far he'll push something."

He made to step forward, to throttle the grinning mongrel bastard just for the sheer pleasure of it, but he couldn't move – his physical manifestation was frozen to the ground. What the hell ..? "No Human could fool me! You did something!"

"I did. I hid the escape hatch."

"What?"

Bob tapped his – Logan's – head. "Deep in some very ugly memories even Logan doesn't like to think about, there was a dead man's switch. If he died, I came back. And lo and behold, you killed him, like we figured you would." He gazed down at the body of the Brachen half-breed directly behind Yama, and grimaced. "And you did that too. Wow. See, I knew you'd be such an arrogant bastard you'd miss a detail."

He was just making things up to taunt him. Bob was disgustingly Human in that respect. "What detail?"

"He was the Gorgons'. They're not gonna like that."

He scoffed derisively. Was that all Bob had? How the so called mighty had fallen. "Like I can't beat those sorry old bitches."

"No, you can't. They're not death gods, but they're death warriors, aren't they? Guardians of the gates of the underworld. And they can make your life – such as it is – an unending torment. Especially if you're not getting a power boost from the book of the dead." Bob looked over at the pile of snakes that had formed into Degei. "Got it?"

Degei dipped his serpentine head in a formal nod.

"No," he said, sure this was a trick of Bob's. "It's still mine! No one has intruded upon my realm -"

"Oh, you'd notice a garter snake, then?" Bob interrupted. "Especially when you were keeping such a close eye on Logan? Degei doesn't need energy to see through a snake's eyes."

So Bob called in some of his dubious contacts. He really should have seen that coming. "So you and your snake friend tried an end run around me. Fair enough, but I have friends too, you know."

Bob grinned, and it looked inappropriate on a Human face. There was too much smugness for a Human to contain. "No you don't. You've burned every bridge you have, and then pissed on them for good measure. Another thing we were counting on."

"Who's "we"? You and the Powers?"

"Me and Logan. Know what I love about this guy? He shouldn't be a good guy. He shouldn't! He's totally wrong. Bad guys are always ruthless and willing to do whatever it takes to win; good guys usually just persevere. But Logan's fucking ruthless; he's the good guy equivalent of a suicide bomber. So if it took him and Bren having to die to put you away for good, he was willing to have his mind fucked over again. He was really sorry about Bren, though. But I assured him that all of this timeline will be undone as soon as we restored the book and got your ass back into exile. Speaking of which, what did you do to Sy? I'd love you forever if you killed him."

"The cowardly fucker's hiding," he grumbled. Now he couldn't move his arms. What the hell ..? He looked down, and saw, curiously, that he was slowly but surely turning to stone. The creeping greyness of granite seemed to have spread out from a puddle of the Brachen's blood, and had now creeped its way up to mid chest, like an avaricious fungus. No ... the Gorgons couldn't be stronger than him. He concentrated, tried to summon up his power, lose this form, but nothing was happening. He had been cut off. "My pantheon -"

"Hates your fucking guts," Bob said, chuckling slightly. "And I should know, as we shared one, remember? Every time you left, all topics of conversation switched to what a dick you are. Nobody's sorry to see you go. There are a billion death gods, most better than you."

Panic was setting in. This shouldn't have been able to happen. Why was this happening? Someone must have been helping the Gorgons - that was the only explanation. "You couldn't have known the half breed bitch would get involved! You couldn't have known I'd kill him!"

"Ah, yes we could. Because Angel would want to try and save his friend - Logan - and he had very limited options countering my powers in a way that wouldn't immediately kill him. Brendan and his connection to the Gorgons was the best first act. You have to use one god to fight another, and if the Gorgons gave a shit about me or anything I did, they could make my life a living hell too. But luckily they're hands off sort of gods. They don't get involved until you piss them off." Bob gave him that smile again, all teeth and malice. " And you did. You broke something of theirs. I don't pity you at all."

The stone had crept all the way to his shoulders now; it looked like he was wearing a body stocking made of cement. "You can't kill me. I am Death!"

He rolled his eyes. "You and a couple hundred other pricks. Besides, I'm sure the girls aren't going to kill you. They're just going to make you wish you were dead." Bob waved at him. "Have a good time! I'm sure it'll be over in a couple of millennia. Write if you get work. Or your arms back, whichever comes first."

When the world sealed off in a cast of concrete, Yama realized it was actually better than putting up with Bob's ego for one more second.

He supposed he'd better hold on to that feeling. He might need it again soon.

***

Yama became a stone statue of himself, frozen forever with a sneer on his face, then the light flared up and he disappeared as the Gorgons pulled him to their realm. Poor bastard. He almost felt sorry for him. Of all enemies to make, the Gorgons were amongst the hardest to acquire, but they were also amongst the worst to have. Pity was a foreign concept, but sadism was a lovely friend they always had over for tea. If there was any way he could have gotten them involved besides the death of Bren he'd have done it, but the girls just weren't interested in Human affairs - they were only interested in their one piece of it.

He crouched down and patted Bren on the head. Not that he could feel it, being dead and all. "Sorry about that, mate. But you'll be alive again in no time." He wondered if he should ever tell the boy why he got chosen. The Gorgons were quite funny about their selection process - they only picked the most pure at heart as their Chosens. You couldn't have a mean or truly malicious bone in your body, you couldn't be even a slightly evil bastard, as they wouldn't want to deal with you. They gave the benefit of their aegis to those least likely to want it or abuse it. It meant that Bren was a genuinely good person, and since he idolized Logan, such a revelation would probably embarrass the shit out of him, so he never told him.

He knew with Rags it was probably less obvious, but he was a Persaid, and you couldn't get more self-sacrificing or well intentioned than that. It also explained his chronic drinking problem, because being good in this world was hard enough to be a chore. To his kind, it must have been a thousand different kinds of agony. It was not an ideal place for the pure at heart.

He glanced up at Degei, and asked, "You got him?"

"He's there," he agreed.

"Let's go."

He hardly needed to say it, as the words were barely out of his mouth by the time they materialized there, in Degei's misty realm of forests and plains, all made of a billion different snakes. You didn't know it unless they moved while you were walking, and suddenly the ground shifted, became a fractal of movement as all its different parts were suddenly obvious and exposed, the strings of the universe visible for a millisecond before pulling themselves together.

Logan was waiting in Degei's charmingly quaint little cottage, looking confused. "What the hell -"

"Remember," Bob said, and that's all it took.

He gasped in pain and grabbed his head, and after a minute to process it all and recover from the shock, he straightened up and said, "It worked."

"Perfectly. In fact, the Gorgons kicked in earlier than I thought. Which means they're really pissed, and are probably crushing Yama to pebbles right now to line their driveway. Couldn't happen to a nicer prick."

He nodded almost robotically, and Bob knew he was struggling with his memories. And how was this not going to be devastating? He made a world where he wasn't fucked over or tortured, where his wife didn't die horribly, where he was never a homeless drifter constantly looking over his shoulder like a hunted animal, where he didn't lose everyone who meant something to him. In a way, to tantalize him with something like that and then rip it away was crueler than any of that.

He turned to Degei, who had busied himself making tea in a porcelain pot decorated with Delft blue snakes, and asked, "Can you take the book back, restore the names?"

He put the pot down on a boa, which wrapped its body around it to keep it warm and stable. "Shouldn't be a problem. Do you think I should find some way to notify Sy that he could come back?"

"Naw, let the little weasel stew. Who's going to miss him?"

Degei actually contemplated that, like it was a serious question. He was so cute sometimes. "I guess no one worships Osiris anymore."

"They never should have worshiped him in the first place. He's a dick."

"Most gods are dicks."

"Yeah, but he's the most dickish dick of them all. Well, aside from Zeus."

At that, Degei rolled his huge snake eyes. "He really should have been neutered."

"Would have saved us all a lot of grief." Zeus would have fucked a coffee table - in fact, he may have. He'd heard no stories to the contrary.

Degei popped out of existence, and the boa brought the tea pot to Bob. He picked it up and brought it over to the table where Logan was sitting and trying very hard not to cry. Bob sat down, and asked, "Cup?"

A cobra emerged from nowhere, dragging a matching tea cup across the table towards him. Another one showed up, dragged a cup to Logan's side, and then they disappeared, slithering back to the floor. Logan looked up, his eyes bright with pain, and said, "You know, this never ceases to be weird."

"Trained snakes?"

"Yeah. And this place is all snakes, isn't it?"

"Yep. I will admit, Degei always got an A for creativity. Most gods don't do their theme all the way like he does. He's fully committed." Bob poured them each a steaming cup of what smelled like peppermint tea, and set the pot down. "Mate, you know I feel your pain. So it's okay to lose it. Nobody's gonna blame you."

He grimaced and looked down at his cup. "No point. I volunteered for this, I knew it was gonna hurt."

"Emotional pain is impossible to brace for. You can ready yourself for physical pain, but this kind really stings."

"Yeah well, I know that," he snapped, and then rubbed his eyes, trying to hide the tears. Part of it was his macho aesthetic, the other half was him kicking himself mercilessly._ You knew it was going to hurt, you knew it wasn't going to be easy, you can't cry Uncle now you pussy piece of shit_. No one was harder on Logan than he was on himself. After a long moment, he said, "I ain't a suicide bomber, those people are idiots."

"Agreed. You're a new kind of suicide bomber. You don't take out the innocent, and you know full well you're going to come back, and it's gonna hurt like fuck. But you do it anyways. That takes a greater level of commitment." He sipped his tea. Very nice. You'd never know it was made from dried snake scales. (Degei believed in recycling way before recycling was the norm.)

Logan had his head down, a hand on his forehead conveniently covering his eyes. "You're gonna turn the world back."

He shook his head. "Doesn't work like that. Once Degei restores all the name, time will snap back to the point of the initial erasure. Reality doesn't like to be messed with, not on such a grandly violent scale. Think of it as a universal retcon."

"Retcon?"

"Comic book term. You wouldn't know it."

He grunted a type of acknowledgment, then suddenly looked up. His eyes were moist with tears, but he didn't care for the moment. "Marc. Holy shit, where's Marc and everyone else? I couldn't find them."

Bob scowled. Okay, yeah, that probably wouldn't be retconned. If Yama didn't have them - and Degei would have mentioned Human hostages in his realm - they were a part of something else. "Best case scenario, they were somehow part of this book of the dead thing and will come back. If not, I'll look for them. They can't be hidden away where I can't find them."

"But it might take you a while."

"Only 'cause there's a billion universes to search. I'll whittle it down. Don't worry, I'll find them."

"Better." He went back to rubbing his eyes and mentally berating himself. "You're gonna make me forget, aren't you?"

"No. Your memories will fade simply because as far as reality is concerned, it never happened. The retcon's a full stop; no one will remember anything about it. Timelines like to snap back to place, and the Human mind isn't really built to juggle competing realities."

"Then where will we think Marc and the others are?"

"We won't. They'll be missing and it'll be baffling, but you won't know when they went or why. They probably won't remember either once they get back."

Logan sniffed, running a hand under his nose. "Best for everyone."

"Probably." Although personally Bob would like to know who took them and why. There was no way it could be a good thing.

Although maybe he shouldn't be a pessimist. There'd been enough gloom for a while.

****

Eventually they all met up in a clearing: Giles, Marc, Xander, Helga, Mat. Saddiq was missing, but they had no confirmation he had come with them, and Marc was pretty sure he'd have been the first to find them if he had, mainly because the guy was just this side of a robot. Xander thought that was unfair, Saddiq was really just this side of a Terminator, but he kept that to himself.

Mat was having the hardest time with this, which probably figured, because he was the newest to this weirdness. He was sitting on a large rock the size of a really big ottoman, which Xander had mentally dubbed a troll stool. He wished he could share this witticism, but nobody was really in a laughing mood at the moment. "You're saying we're in another universe?"

Giles shrugged kind of helplessly. "Dimension is the preferred term, but universe is acceptable."

Mat just shook his blond Swedish head. "This is nuts. You guys believe this?"

"Hey dude, we were fighting zombies before we ended up here," Xander said. "Why do you have a problem with this but didn't have a problem with that?"

"I had a problem with that, but ... what do you do? It didn't seem like the time for a discussion."

"Why are we discussing this?" Helga asked impatiently, her tail twitching. "We've been depowered for a reason. We're sitting ducks."

Giles sighed wearily. He was sitting on a fallen long, and looked like he was trying very hard not to pass out. "Probably, but we can't prepare to fight an enemy when we know nothing about them. Especially since our opponent is probably a god."

"In that case, we're just fucked," Marc said. He was pacing back forth in a sort of looping oval, his goggles balanced on his forehead, giving them all a good, hard look at his big freaky alien eyes. You'd think if this place shut down all mutant powers it would have given him more Human eyes, but presumably it couldn't alter physical mutations, just cut off their purpose. That almost felt like a clue, but to what? He didn't know, he didn't even try and make sense of it. "All we can do is wait for the punchline."

"That's what bothers me," Helga groused.

Mat looked at Marc with a look he couldn't quite interpret. Was it awe? Did he want a sandwich? Had Marc kicked his grandmother? It could have been any of those things. "Nothing ever bothers you, does it?"

"Course it does. But there's a time and a place for a freak out, usually a bus station bathroom at two AM with a bottle of absinthe and a ticket to Delaware."

"I so want to party with you," Xander replied. "But I'm afraid I'll wake up concussed and pantsless in a Mexican jail with a cock painted on my face."

"Painted on if you were lucky," Marc said.

Ay chihuahua, he wasn't even going there.

Giles was giving Helga a weary glance. "See what I have to put up with?"

Maybe she was going to reply to that, he didn't know. What happened next was she looked up at the sky, and there was this noise ...

Impossible to describe. He had no words for it. Maybe it was like a match being dragged across an ignition strip in super slow motion, the sound amplified and distorted through a broken speaker. It sent a shudder through his body, almost a bubbling from his spine to his scalp, like his skin wanted to crawl off and hide. Everyone was looking now, including him, although he hadn't really wanted to. But that sort of thing compelled you.

A line was being drawn across the sky. A line of fire that seemed to be burning the sky like it was a newspaper curtain. Beyond was nothing but blackness, as deep and unfathomable as Marc's freaky alien eyes.

Old habits died hard, because as soon as he found his voice, he exclaimed, "Please tell me you know what's happening, Giles."

But he didn't reply, because he didn't have an answer. He didn't know. Which was really the worst thing of all.


	16. Chapter 16

16

Things got much better, because as soon as the line of fire started to die in the sky, there was a huge, Jurassic Park sized thud.

"Well, that's not good," Mat noted.

There was another thud, and yet another. Something big was walking, and while it was impossible to say in which direction it was moving, Marc was willing to bet it was coming towards them. It was exactly how their day was going. Wait, day? Week, month, year, lifetime, complete existence. "Everybody get to the trees," he said, gesturing to the others. "I'll hold it off as long as I can."

"With what?" Xander asked. "Your stunning good looks?"

"Thanks sweetheart, but I'm taken."

"Ew."

"This thing sounds like an ogre," Helga interjected. "And you're a Human. I don't care if you have guns, it ain't gonna do shit to something as tall as a skyscraper."

He looked at her curiously. "Ogres exist?"

"In some dimensions, yeah."

"What hurts 'em?"

She had to think about that a moment, as the thuds continued, and seemed to be growing louder. Nothing was blocking the sun, so he took that as a good sign. "Battery acid, magnesium, magic."

"Anyone got any of that?"

"You know the answer," Giles replied icily.

"Okay then, we're fucked. What a shock. Get to the trees, I'll do my best to annoy it before it stomps me flat."

"Fuck you," Helga snapped. "I'm the only one with any kind of power here; I'm still a demon. I'll distract it."

"I'm a mercenary, hon. I make it my job to be the most annoying thing around."

"And I'm an assassin. No one's a bigger dick than me."

"Dick Cheney," Xander said.

"No one here is a bigger dick than me," Helga corrected, giving him a dirty look. Xander was so used to getting dirty looks he only shrugged.

The thudding was pretty much answering the question for them, as they were running out of time. Marc decided to make the decision for both of them. "Fine, we'll keep it occupied, you guys get to the trees."

"And you'll keep it occupied for what, thirty seconds?"Giles asked.

Marc shot him a harsh look. "You have any better ideas, I'm open to 'em."

Of course there were no other ideas. Any way you sliced this, they were screwed.

As the others drifted off, Mark asked Helga, "Got a plan?"

She shrugged. "Don't die."

"Yeah, that's all I got too." It wasn't much, but what else did they have?

Finally a shadow blocked out the sun, and Marc thought that he was seeing things (it was still weird having flat, normal eyes). They were looking at something vaguely humanoid, but outlined in dark orange fire, like it was covered in neon tubing. But the outline was it. Inside it was nothing but blackness, night trapped in a light cage. It looked about three stories tall.

"Is that an ogre? "he asked, doubting it.

She shook her head, staring up at it in wonder. "No."

"What is it?"

"I've got no fucking clue." After staring at it a moment, she asked, "Is it one dimensional? How the hell is it thudding?"

"It's the manifestation of a pan-dimensional being. It exists in several dimensions at the same time, so it's not two dimensional, it's actually forty eight dimensional. But 'cause your eyes can't see like that, it looks flat to you."

They both turned, and Bob was standing there, grinning like a kid who got the last cookie out of the jar.

"Where the fuck have you been?" Helga shouted, punching him in the arm. "Asshole! You were holding back for a last minute entrance!"

"Nope. Just couldn't find you. And no wonder, I thought this dimension had collapsed by now."

"What the fuck is that thing?" Marc asked, pointing at the neon lined shadow.

"A Fravartin."

"Gesundheit," he replied.

Bob grinned even wider at that. "It's a guardian. It sees you as trespassers. You're not supposed to be here."

"We don't want to be here! Can't you tell it that?"

"I'll try,"Bob suddenly launched himself upward, like he had a flying mutation. As the others came out of the woods, Mat asked, "He can fly?"

"He's an energy being," Giles told him. "He can do anything he bloody wants."

Bob flew right up in front of the building sized guardian, and it stopped in its tracks. For a minute, nothing seemed to happen, but the guardian soon turned and thudded off from the direction it came in. Bob flew back down, hovering for a moment above the earth before landing in front of them. "This is really weird. It had no idea Saurva's gone, and has been gone for a long time."

"The owner of this dump?" Marc guessed.

Bob nodded. "He's been exiled to Earth, 'cause he pissed off the wrong god. His realm should have collapsed in on itself. Mine did."

"Oh god, there's another you down there?" Helga asked, shaking her head in exasperation.

"Not really. He's a tortoise."

"What?" Xander asked first.

"He was trapped in the body of a tortoise. He's at the San Diego Zoo, actually, I've seen him."

"And you didn't help him?" Giles asked.

"Why would I? He has no idea he used to be a god, and he's really happy. He's got three hots and a cot, all the lettuce he can eat, his own pool unmarred by predators, and he can lay eggs without fear of them being eaten." At their looks, he said, "He's a female tortoise. Gods, remember? Gender doesn't matter. Anyways, he was always a dick, as this realm indicates, and he deserved so much worse, so I don't see helping him. Besides, when he dies as a tortoise, he'll be back in god form, probably remembering how happy he was as a torty. If that ain't torture, I don't know what is."

Xander scowled, and looked seriously pissed. "What is it with you gods? You're all a bunch of fucking nuts!"

Bob just smiled at him. "What's your point, mate?"

Xander looked like he was about to have a hissy fit, so Marc quickly interjected, "Who brought us here? Yama?"

Bob looked almost relieved for the subject change. "No. But I've got no idea who did, which is why I had such a hard time findin' you. There isn't enough residual energy to tell me who's responsible. All I can say is they're not here now." Bob squinted up into the sky, as if there was something to see. "Weird. Who'd use Saurva's old realm? Who knew it was even still here? Strange." After a moment of staring at nothing, he clapped his hands together, and said, "Well, time to get you back. On the plus side, you missed the fight. Slackers."

"You took out Yama already?" Helga responded. She sounded disappointed.

"I didn't. The Gorgons did."

"How'd you get them involved?" Helga asked. "I thought they didn't like to get involved in this internecine shit."

"Yama did something stupid. That's the thing with arrogant pricks – sometimes they neither know nor care who they're pissing off, until it bites them in the ass. So, I told the Fravartin we were leavin', which is the only reason I didn't hafta boot him into that dimension where everybody looks like Donald Duck. Better put your goggles back on, Marc, or you'll be in for a nasty shock. I think it's afternoon back in L.A., and the smog ain't enough to protect you."

"What, it's over?" Marc asked. "Just like that?"

"Just like that. I guess someone wanted you guys to sit this one out."

"Who?"

He shook his head and shrugged. "No clue. Probably doesn't matter either. I mean, if they were evil, they'd have already killed you."

Marc was sure he heard an unspoken "maybe" in that sentence, and scowled at him as he lowered his goggles. "Unless they had something else planned for us."

"Yeah, that's a possibility, but they missed out, didn't they?" He gave him a teeth bearing grin that was almost nothing but false confidence. For once in his life, Bob didn't know anything, and it bothered him, although he was trying to hide it as best he could. What could Bob not know? That in itself was kind of troubling.

"Could it be one of your smart ass god friends playing a prank on all of us?"Helga wondered, giving him a knowing glare.

Bob half shrugged. "Could be. Those that do have a sense of humor are pretty kinky."

Xander was shaking his head in disgust. "Just get us out of here, Mister Happy Pants."

"Happy Pants?" Mat asked.

"He's got like eight million kids," Xander explained. "How is he not a happy pants?"

Helga grabbed Bob's arm, and whispered in his ear, "This is serious. Somebody did this to us for a reason."

Marc agreed. But would Bob ever tell them the truth? He didn't like to gamble, but he bet not.

****

Angel bolted up in his chair and stood up, suddenly certain something was wrong. He wasn't completely sure what, but ... something.

He darted out into the front room of the office to find Bren behind the receptionist desk, typing something out onto the computer, while Rogue and Xander sat on the sofa, debating over whose turn it was to make the coffee. This struck him as bizarre for some reason and stopped him short.

Bren noticed him first. "Something wrong?"

Angel wanted to say 'You're dead', but he didn't, mainly because he didn't know why he thought he was or should be. He also thought they should be fighting zombies, but again, why? He rubbed his forehead, feeling the same kind of reeling disorientation he did when he was dropped into another universe – or out of it. Was that what happened? Had reality been warped or somehow reset?

One named popped into his head: Bob. Damn it. What had he done? "I don't know," Angel admitted. "Has anything ... unusual happened this morning?"

"It's Los Angeles," Xander said. "Unusual is normal. If I didn't see a hooker dressed like a clown masturbating into a mailbox on Sunset, that would be unusual."

"Ew!" Rogue exclaimed, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "You're makin' that up. You have not ever seen that."

"I have," he insisted. "I've also seen a fat guy dressed like Spider-Man fighting a guy dressed like a syphilis ravaged version of Spongebob Squarepants near Mann's Chinese Theater. Almost made me homesick for Sunnydale."

"Everything weird happens on Sunset," Bren said. "What the hell were you doing there? I thought you claimed to be straight."

Xander gave him an evil look. "Laugh it up, bi boy. I drive by it on my way to work."

"Isn't that congested?" Angel asked, pretty sure that was some of the worst traffic within the city (and that was saying something.)

Xander shrugged. "Sure, but the entertainment value's priceless."

"As long as you have your priorities in order," Angel said, deadpan. He was sure something about all of this was wrong – besides the obvious – but he couldn't place it, and the more time passed, the more foolish he felt. Why did he think Bren was dead? And for a moment, he didn't know why Xander was here, as he was sure he was missing.

He was sure Bob had done something ... but he no longer knew what or why.

Well, if he did do something, what were the odds he'd ever tell him the truth? Probably very bad.

Angel stood there for a long time, wondering if this was something he should be worried about. Ultimately he decided no. As long as everyone was okay and accounted for, there was no need to worry at all.

Right?

****

Logan didn't so much as wake up as he fell out of bed.

He instantly rolled up to his feet, hands curled into fists, claws ready to pop, but as he looked around the darkened room, he was alone. He couldn't scent anyone, but the room was very familiar: his room at Xavier's. Now he wasn't angry, he was just disoriented. Was he supposed to be here? For some reason he was sure he'd been in ... Japan? No, Los Angeles. Wait ... both? That was impossible, but he felt two distinct tugs of memory. All he knew was he wasn't sure he was supposed to be here. So why was he?

He stood scratching his head for a moment, then went into the bathroom to drain his bladder and see if there was any still healing injuries on his face.

He didn't see any, and was looking at his chest – for some reason, he expected a hole in the center – when he heard Bob singing, "There's an audience, and someone will remember this ..."

He was too accustomed to his rude entries to even be surprised by it anymore. "What the fuck did you do?"

"Me? I just got here, mate." He turned to see Bob in his rock star gear – leather pants, boots, "Sausage Victim" t-shirt – grinning at him with an innocence he never could have possessed. Logan just glared at him until he said, "Fine. What do you remember?"

That shouldn't have been such a hard question to answer. But Logan tried to force the memories into some kind of coherence, and couldn't quite. Wasn't that always the way? Eventually, he had to concede, "It isn't memories, exactly. It's ... feelings. I'm not supposed to be here. Or at least I wasn't here ... I dunno." He rubbed his eyes, and guessed, "We had another god fight, didn't we?"

"What makes you say that?"

"'Cause I always feel this out of sorts after a god fight. I'm guessin' we won?"

"Well, we're still here, aren't we?"

Logan threw up his hands, shaking his head at Bob's non answer. He should be used to them by now, but he didn't like them. "You gonna tell me why I woke up feeling so weird?"

"Weird how?"

He hesitated, not quite sure how to explain it. When he realized what it was, he was baffled by his own initial reaction. "Happiness. I was happy."

"Weird for you, I guess."

He frowned at him, but of course he was right. If he was a normal person, it wouldn't have baffled him."What the hell did we do?"

"Saved the world from a cranky pants death god." He paused briefly, before adding, "You know, I'm not a big believer in fate or destiny or the whatnot and the hey hey, but I do believe that some good can sometimes come out of tragedy. Not that it's good to suffer, or that it always happens, but sometimes a positive comes out of it. I mean, as much as it killed me to lose my first wife and kids, it was that loss that led me to discovering I was really a god. I probably would have found out eventually, without their deaths – and believe me, I'd have preferred that – but I can't deny that that was a factor. As painful as it was, the loss turned out to be necessary."

"Who died?"

"What, you mean recently? No one to my knowledge."

"So what's this depressing pep talk about?"

"Nothing, I just felt like being Yoda for a moment."

He didn't quite believe that, but he could hardly force the truth out of him. "You done? Or are you gonna levitate a spaceship and make me kiss my sister first?"

"Ooh, could I?" Bob rubbed his hands together and grinned maniacally. Logan rolled his eyes and turned away, wondering why he ever gave him an opportunity to make a smart assed comment.

"Look, I'm just saying while shitty things happen to you, maybe good does come out of it. I mean, after the first two or three shitty things that happened to you, the others were pretty superfluous. But they made you the man you are today."

"The assassin with a heart of gold."

"Don't be that way. Let me have a profound moment."

Logan sighed. "Fine." He did know what Bob was trying to say, and he appreciated the sentiment, although he was honestly worried that Bob felt the need to point this out. Did something happen to him that was particularly bad? He was pretty sure he died again – he was always a little discombobulated after he died – but he imagined that wasn't it. Death was no longer an eyebrow raiser, although that was pretty fucking troubling by itself.

Suddenly he got it. Bob was trying to comfort him because, while he'd never be truly happy again, at least he could fight like a motherfucker. Then he realized he thought he was in Japan, he was in Japan and happy, and he thought of Mariko with a sickening twist in his gut. Oh shit ...

Bob put a hand on his back, and said, "No, mate, don't think like that. You should be proud of yourself. You bluffed a death god and saved the world. Not many people could have pulled that off."

He didn't feel bad at all, wondered what he had been thinking about, and guessed that Bob had probably pushed him. Over what and why he couldn't say, though the idea of it annoyed him for a second. "Being crazy helped."

"Doesn't it always?" Bob backed up, grinning like an idiot, and while he was still annoyed at him, he felt ... almost good. He had done something good, hadn't he? It would have been nicer if it paid off more, but hey, can't have everything. Could you?

He turned to ask Bob if he could get a little something for this – peace of mind, a new bike, the undying love of a few hundred bikini clad nymphets – but Bob was gone, as abruptly as he had shown up. Figured.

He had no hope of getting back to sleep, so he went ahead and took a shower, trying for a while to remember what happened before giving up. He wasn't even sure what he was trying to remember anymore.

He was getting dressed when there was an almost timid knock at his door. He shrugged into a t-shirt and said, "Yeah?"

"Monosyllabic. Well, at least I know I found the right room," a familiar but unexpected female voice replied.

He felt a little twinge in his heart, and opened the door to make sure. Yep, it was her. "Naomi, what're you doing here?"

She was standing there in the hall, dressed in a casual wardrobe of jeans, a red and black sweater, and an oversized green suede jacket that was probably's a man. She'd gotten a new haircut, short and spiky, frosted electric blue at the tips. She looked good, although tired. "Well, I just got out of Canada, and I figured what the hell. Might as well stop by. So, did I miss anything?"

"What, here? Nah. Usual shit."

"Apocalypse?"

He shrugged. "Depends on your definition of one."

"Oh boy, a newbie and no one told me," Shaheen said, coming up to them and pulling out a PDA.

"She's not really a newbie," Logan said, and then introduced them. "Naomi, this is Doctor Shaheen Khoury. Doc, this is Naomi Deschanel, also known as Electra."

"Stupid, stupid name," Naomi said. "I'd rather change it to Volt or something cooler."

"That might be too close to the code name the kids decided I should have," Shaheen said, scrolling through the records on her PDA.

Logan knew she didn't have a code name and was determined to find one, but hated every single one suggested. The closest they'd come to one was Battery, which sort of explained her powers, but was, admittedly, bad. (Although a pretty kick ass Metallica song. Him pointing that out hadn't helped matters at all.) "What did the kids pick?" he wondered.

"Jolt. Which I believe is a type of cola."

"It makes you sound electrical," he said.

"Or like a speedster," Naomi said.

Shaheen nodded in general agreement. "I know, I don't like it any better than Jump Start, which was the runner up, but sounded just a bit too much like an after school program for me. Ah, here we go, Electra, electrical channeling and manipulation, ooh, another level three mutant here to make me feel inadequate. Nice to meet you."

They shook hands – Naomi had gloves on, so Shaheen didn't get an unpleasant shock – and then Naomi asked, "What's level three mean?"

"Oh, it's a classification system Xavier cooked up," Shaheen explained. "A level three is pretty much as high as a mutant could get, save for a mythical level four, which would have nigh apocalyptic powers. It means if you wanted to, you could really fuck shit up; your powers could disable or destroy several people and/or city blocks. Xavier was a level three, Magneto, Jean, Storm. I'm a level one, which is for us localized, puny ass bastards. I just boost the powers of other mutants, so I could only aid and abet someone else."

"Hey, ain't I a level one?" he interjected. "I take exception to being called a puny ass."

"No, you're a qualified level two."

"Qualified?"

"It's not so much your powers that are dangerous, it's you. You could destroy that city block, it'd just take you much longer."

"Ah. So I'm in on the lethal personality clause."

Naomi gave him a tight but affectionate smile. "If the label fits, wear it."

"Very funny." He supposed he should take some pride in that too. What he lacked in powers he more than made up for in an insane refusal to face reality and give the fuck up.

Shaheen finally lowered the PDA, and said, "Since you're here, Logan, I guess you can take over the whole danger room exercise today. That'll spare me from having to deal with Zehra all by myself."

"She being her drama queen self?"

"As always."

"Danger room?" Naomi asked, smiling awkwardly. "That's that holographic practice thing, right?"

"Right." Logan told her. "Wanna see it? Hell, wanna join in?"

"There's an idea," Shaheen said, apparently latching onto the idea with some enthusiasm. "You could zap the kids on the butt when they become unbearable."

"Wish I could. But I'm pretty sure as soon as I call up some electricity I'll probably crash the whole system."

"Oh," Shaheen replied, sounding disappointed. "Damn it. You gotta point."

"You really want to get out of this, don't you?" Logan said to Shaheen.

"Hell yeah. I've been stuck with these moody hormone cases since you left. Goddamn, I never want to have kids." She paused briefly. "Exactly when did you get back anyways?"

Logan shrugged. "No idea." Both Shaheen and Naomi looked at him with raised eyebrows, and he wasn't sure he could take the dual girlfriend stares, especially when in either case it wasn't warranted. They weren't his girlfriends! He looked at Naomi, and said, "Maybe you can't participate, but you could observe, if you wanted. Might give you a laugh."

She gave him a genuine, kind smile. "Sure, why not?"

Naomi showing up after Bob left – that was just coincidence, right? Or something else? He wondered.

So the three of them walked to the Danger Room, with Shaheen filling Naomi in on who their team was (Pyro she knew of, but everyone else was new to her), and he realized that he was almost happy. No, not happy, just ... content maybe. Life wasn't so bad sometimes. Always weird, but not always bad.

He could adjust, right? He was a survivor; his mutant power, if nothing else, was being the ultimate survivor. Like a cockroach, he just lingered, standing still while time moved around him, and while it was horrible, he could take a moment out every now and then to just enjoy what was around him.

There was no need for the indulgence of survivor's guilt. He'd earned himself a moment of peace.

After all, how long could it last?

****

She found herself wandering the forest, stretching out her senses until they encompassed the realm. This wasn't her place, was it? No, but she felt it was a safe place to hide from ... she didn't know. But she sensed a lingering hint of his energy here. He'd come and taken her people away.

They weren't the right people though, were they? She thought they were, but she was confused. The one with the goggles, now he was close to him, but not him.

Him. Pronouns. Could she not put a name to any of this? She sat down and considered this, staring at her hands, which looked wrong somehow. The wrong color? Maybe. Maybe not. Her mind was scrambled, fractured, she almost couldn't make sense of anything. Her first impulse – to find safety, a place to hide, those people ... what was the purpose of those people? She had a feeling she should kill them, then a feeling she should save them. Use them as bargaining chips. Against who?

She found herself thinking of her killer, her savior, and her betrayer. She thought he was one; then she thought they were two. Was there more? Maybe.

The name Bob floated to the surface of her mind, as things calmed and her thoughts became slightly less choppy. He was dangerous, she knew not to trust him. But was there something more?

Yes. Logan. He killed her ... and had she wanted him to? She felt that was true. She seemed to love and hate him in equal measure. She wasn't sure if she wanted to kill him or not.

This realm ... somehow she knew it was empty. The god was gone. How could she know that? Wait ... she didn't know. Someone else knew. Maybe her brain was so scrambled because it wasn't her own alone; she was two different people. No. She was one person, and ... something else. She was the end of everything and the beginning, she was death and fire, blood and war, alpha and omega. She was a god. And somehow she was a Human as well. Odd. She was as conflicted as her mind was, and she didn't know which was going to win, or why she even came out of the darkness in the first place.

Jean Grey waited to discover who would win, and what she was supposed to do next.

******

The End

******

_To my readers:_

_I'm so sorry you had to wait so long for the end of this story. Due to various circumstances in my life, I fell way behind. As such, I think it's best I end these stories for now. It's not necessarily the end – I may be back as soon as circumstances warrant more free time. I also have original fiction on FictionPress, which I hope to continue to update regularly._

_But for now you'll have to forgive me if I end Logan's story here, at least for the moment. Still, you know he and Bob live on, getting into more trouble than any of us could imagine. (Or perhaps not.)_

_Thank you all for reading and sticking with me._

_notmanos_


End file.
